TWA Flight 800 was a scheduled service from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to Paris, flown on the evening of July 17, 1996, by a Boeing 747-131, registration N93119, a 25-year-old aircraft that had made the run many times. Aboard were 230 people: 212 passengers and a crew of 18. The departure had been delayed for over an hour on a hot, humid evening, and the aircraft finally lifted off at 8:19 p.m., climbing out over Long Island toward the Atlantic.
Twelve minutes later, at about 8:31 p.m., as the 747 climbed through 13,800 feet some eight miles off East Moriches, Long Island, its centre wing fuel tank exploded. The blast tore the nose section away from the airframe; what remained climbed briefly, burning, and then fell into the sea. All 230 people aboard were killed. From the shore and from boats below, hundreds of witnesses saw a streak of light in the evening sky — reports that would shape the next four years of investigation.
The recovery that followed was one of the largest salvage operations ever mounted. Navy and Coast Guard divers and remotely operated vehicles worked the debris fields for months, and more than 95 percent of the aircraft was in time brought up from the ocean floor. In a hangar at Calverton, on Long Island — a former Grumman aircraft plant — investigators reassembled the recovered structure on a steel framework, building the shattered 747 back into recognisable shape so the failure could be read in the metal.
Because neither a bomb nor a missile could at first be ruled out, the FBI ran a criminal investigation in parallel with the safety inquiry, and it was the FBI that interviewed the witnesses whose streak-of-light accounts seemed to describe something rising toward the aircraft. After sixteen months, on November 18, 1997, the FBI closed its criminal case, Assistant Director James Kallstrom announcing that no evidence had been found to indicate that a criminal act was the cause. The CIA, asked to analyse the witness accounts, had concluded — and the Safety Board’s own review agreed — that the streak the witnesses saw was the aircraft itself after the explosion, noseless and on fire, climbing briefly before it fell.
The National Transportation Safety Board’s inquiry ran four years and was among the largest in its history. Its final report, Aircraft Accident Report AAR-00/03, was adopted on August 23, 2000, and determined the probable cause to be “an explosion of the center wing fuel tank (CWT) resulting from ignition of the flammable fuel/air mixture in the tank”. The tank held only about 50 gallons of fuel, but heat from the air-conditioning packs mounted directly beneath it had cooked its vapour space into a flammable mixture during the long wait on the ground. Of the spark itself the Board was exact about the limits of its knowledge: the source of ignition energy “could not be determined with certainty”, but of the sources it evaluated, the most likely was a short circuit outside the tank that allowed excessive voltage to enter it through the wiring of the fuel quantity indication system.
The Board’s findings rejected the bomb and missile theories the eyewitness accounts had kept alive: the physical evidence, it concluded, supported no criminal act. The disaster changed the treatment of fuel tanks in aircraft design, ending the assumption that a tank could be kept safe simply by keeping ignition sources out of it, and the Federal Aviation Administration in time required inerting systems — which fill the empty space in a tank with nitrogen-enriched air — on new airliners. On the shore at Smith Point County Park, the nearest land to where the aircraft fell, a memorial to the 230 stands above the beach.