TWA 800: Another anniversary
Part One
July 17, 2025
Today is the 29th anniversary of the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800, which killed 230 people and destroyed a Boeing 747 over the Atlantic about nine miles south of East Moriches on July 17, 1996.
Boeing has come in for a lot of criticism recently: a preliminary report has stated that the recent Air India crash, the first of a 787 Dreamliner, was the result of both engines failing when the fuel supply was switched off, intentionally or not; but the two fatal 737 Max crashes, in 2018 and 2019, and the Alaska Airlines 737 Max losing a door plug in flight in 2024, not to mention safety issues at its South Carolina factory, which led to the suicide of a whistleblower, had already left Boeing looking beleaguered.
It’s easy to forget, then, that the 747 was beloved by pilots, a reliable workhorse of the sky. A pilot I chatted to at LAX in 2014 invoked the familiar maxim “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going,” in describing why he preferred Boeing, with its linked control columns that cannot move independently of each other, to Airbus, whose side sticks are not so linked, which was a factor in the crash of Air France Flight 447 into the South Atlantic in 2009.
It’s ironic to me that Boeing is still blamed for the fuel tank explosion the National Transportation Safety Board said had caused the TWA 800 crash, when no ignition source was found and so many questions remain about whether that was in fact the cause.
So many lies were told.
The morning after the crash, Long Island congressman Michael Forbes emerged from a meeting at East Moriches Coast Guard station and told reporters that someone at the meeting had said that investigators were aware of the location of the airplane’s two black boxes, which were sure to contain vitally important data recorded during the flight.
Almost immediately an NTSB official contradicted him. But Forbes did not retract his comment and years later his aide, Diana Weir, told me she had been present at the meeting and had heard the same good news her boss had heard. Yet the New York Times reported that vessels towed listening equipment back and forth over the ocean in a motion called “mowing the lawn,” in hopes of detecting the pings from the black boxes, until they were located a week later. But aviation journalist Christine Negroni reported in her book, “Deadly Departure,” that Air National Guard pilot Maj. Fred Meyer, who had raced to the crash site after seeing an explosion from his seat in a Sikorsky helicopter while he was performing training manouvers, had noted the exact coordinates where the tail section of TWA 800, containing the black boxes, had hit the water; yet, she wrote, neither the Navy nor NTSB explained why this information wasn’t used to guide the searchers.
It was an early instance of things just not adding up, which proved to be a characteristic pattern.
I reported on the crash and sprawling investigation, at first for a pair of alternative news-and-entertainment weeklies based in Stamford, Conn., and later for the Village Voice. My very first story featured an interview with Isaac Yeffet, a former head of security for El Al Israel Airlines, whom I had seen on a network newsmagazine show talking about how ineffective were the security screening measures in place at major U.S. airports like JFK, from where TWA 800 had departed.
The fact that a violent explosion had shaken the 747 only 12 minutes after takeoff, as it was still climbing toward cruising altitude on its non-stop flight to Paris, left a strong first impression that a terrorist bomb had been responsible; and Yeffet’s jaundiced view of airport security, then still the airlines’ responsibility—apparently little improved since the most recent violent attack on a major American airline, the bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland eight years before—seemed understandable in light of the fact that his airline, an obvious target, had stringent security procedures that had prevented anyone from placing a bomb on any of its flights.
However, it seems, looking back now, as if it was only a moment or two before eyewitness accounts of a streak of light shooting up into the twilight sky began appearing in media accounts, and a conspiracy theory was born, stoked by an online posting that turned out to have come from a retired United Airlines pilot: The 25-year-old 747 had been destroyed not by a bomb, but by a surface-to-air missile fired in error by a United States warship cruising in a nearby so-called military warning area, used at times by the U.S. Navy for exercises.
(The Riverside, Ca., Press-Enterprise, in articles by Dave Hendrix, was responsible for the earliest reporting on this angle.)
The pilot, whose name was Richard Russell, declined to reveal who had given him the information when I visited him at his home in Florida, which backed onto a private airstrip which he used for takeoff and landing in his small plane, garaged behind the house. It was Russell’s posting that former John F. Kennedy press secretary Pierre Salinger got hold of and brandished as proof of a "friendly fire” shootdown. He was dismissed as a doddery has-been. The U.S. Navy said its closest ship to the crash site was the USS Normandy, cruising nearly 200 miles south along the coast of Virginia.
But then I picked up some information from a young pilot, formerly U.S. Navy, recently a “new hire” at TWA, who had been sunbathing at Gilgo State Park with his girlfriend on the afternoon of the crash and had seen a warship several miles offshore, about which he had emailed his union, a party to the NTSB’s TWA 800 investigation. The pilot said in his message that it was impossible for the ship he had seen, cruising lazily along the Long Island coastline, to have been as far away as the Navy said the Normandy was at 8:30 pm or so, the time of the crash, unless it had sailed at top speed, 35 knots, which was hard to imagine, given the amount of fuel it would have burned to get there. Thus it seemed possible that another, unidentified warship had been sailing a lot closer to the crash site.
Neither Navy, nor NTSB, nor FBI, which had taken over interviewing eyewitnesses, would comment on the mystery ship, which became the scoop of my first story in the Village Voice. People tend to think the Voice shoots from the lip, but in those days they had a rigorous fact-checking process that I found quite intimidating.
My story had a postscript of sorts: Capt. Jerry Rekart, a TWA pilot and lead investigator of the pilots’ union, told me that he had asked an NTSB official whether a naval warship had been in those waters that day and had received the answer “Probably.”
The FBI’s criminal investigation took control of any potential evidence of a bomb or missile; but the only missile scenario considered was a shoulder-launched terrorist missile. A friendly fire incident would have been a tragic error, and not a crime, presumably. By dividing up the investigation into two, the FBI searching for evidence of a crime while the NTSB focused on evidence of mechanical failure, the media and public were conditioned to ignore the possibility that a potential cause might fall outside those two categories.
The division of labor between FBI and NTSB was treated as uncontroversial by NTSB Chairman Jim Hall at the final board meeting and vote in August 2000. The NTSB’s investigators were not criminal investigators, he said. But in fact in previous crash investigations the FBI took over only if and when evidence of a crime had been uncovered, while for the TWA 800 probe the FBI had control of certain evidence almost immediately, and then announced at a November 1997 press conference that it had discovered no evidence of a bomb or missile.
The investigation concluded in August 2000 with the finding that an electrical fault, the precise nature of which remained unknown to investigators, had probably ignited hot fuel vapors in the almost empty center fuel tank, resulting in a devastating explosion. But despite the NTSB and FAA’s citations of previous aviation fuel tank explosions, there had never been such an instantly catastrophic explosion in an airplane in flight that hadn’t been caused by the detonation of high explosive material—such as in PanAm 103, for example.
One intriguing detail in an investigation that spawned thousands was that the Suffolk County medical examiner, Dr. Charles Wetli, who later described the victims’ bodies as “projectile traps,” with multiple foreign objects embedded in them, was instructed not to examine their eardrums. Exploding devices in Iraq had created high pressure waves that ruptured the eardrums of nearby soldiers, and so this injury in the victims of TWA 800 would have been a clue that the accident had been caused by a high explosive device such as a bomb or missile warhead. I remember that Dr. Wetli also said most of the victims died instantly as their necks were broken by severe whiplash—which seems to suggest an external force acted on the aircraft to suddenly slow its momentum.
Some of the evidence I reported in the Voice included a piece of the front of one wing that was peppered with a series of holes. The FBI took the piece down to Washington for analysis, but never explained what might have caused the holes; neither did the NTSB attempt to explain the damage in any of its reports. And then there was perhaps the single most baffling piece of evidence: formerly molten material was recovered from the outside of the roof, or upper skin, of the center fuel tank, and from the inside of a fragment of the front wall of the tank. The splatter, as the NTSB called it in a report, was similar in its chemical composition to foam insulation material that had been wrapped around an air conditioning duct that ran across the top of the tank, just beneath the passenger cabin floor. The splatter had apparently been sprayed across the top of the center tank before the tank surface fractured. “This was shown by the general continuity of deposit streaks across the fractures,” the report stated. “It’s the anomalies that are trying to tell you something,” a veteran crash investigator told me; but the NTSB did not publicly acknowledge any effort to identify what could have produced the molten splatter outside the tank roof, heated to nearly 500 degrees Fahrenheit, at a moment when the roof was still intact.
The fragment of the tank with a bit of splatter on it was found closer to JFK than any other debris, suggesting that it was ejected from the aircraft very early in the very rapid breakup.
The NTSB, at some time during a weeklong hearing into its TWA 800 investigation that it held at a Baltimore convention center in December 1997, discussed a previous accident, of PanAm 214, a Boeing 707 that crashed during a storm in Elkton, Md, in December 1963 after lightning struck the left wing tip and ignited vapors in an outer wing fuel tank in an explosion that tore part of the wing off.
The fuel in PanAm 214 was a mixture of Jet A kerosene, the widely used aviation jet fuel that powered TWA 800’s four Pratt and Whitney engines, and a more explosive petroleum-based fuel named JP-4. The NTSB seemed to suggest that PanAm 214’s crash had indicated the dangers of permitting flammable fuel vapors to accumulate inside an aircraft fuel tank, without acknowledging the effect of the more dangerous JP-4, which was flammable at lower temperatures than Jet A. It was known that a mixture of the two fuels tended to display the characteristics of JP-4.
One poignant fact that distinguished PanAm 214 from TWA 800 was that the 707’s systems remained operating long enough for one of its pilots to be able to radio a “Mayday” emergency appeal for help; whereas TWA 800’s radio communications were normal until its electronic systems were instantly cut after the cockpit voice recorder registered a very loud sound, losing any last words of alarm from the crew.
The year after the Elkton crash, 1964, saw another fuel tank explosion with tragic results. Another 707, this one in Rome, struck a steam roller as the pilot was aborting his takeoff because of an engine malfunction.
In a 1967 book, “Airline Safety is a Myth,” the pilot explains that he was able to bring the plane safely to a halt without injuries, but a flame, produced when his outboard right engine had struck the steam roller, quickly reached the center fuel tank, igniting fumes, which exploded and blew up into the passenger cabin, killing and injuring many. More passengers were injured and died in the flames from burning fuel on the ground. In his book, Capt. Vernon W. Lowell calls for the FAA to ban the JP-4 fuel that had been inside the fuel tanks of his plane, which by the way, in a coincidence of cosmic proportions, was designated TWA Flight 800.
Who knows why the NTSB didn’t mention this previous TWA 800 that suffered a center fuel tank explosion at its Baltimore hearing. Capt. Lowell in his book laments the fact that empty or almost empty fuel tanks, filled with fuel fumes, could be deadly; which was exactly the argument the NTSB was making at Baltimore. However, he also gives TWA credit for installing a safety system to prevent future lightning strikes from reaching fuel tanks. And airlines voluntarily dropped JP-4, so that Jet A was soon their default choice. But the NTSB was reluctant to credit these changes as having made air travel safer.
In its final report the NTSB briefly mentioned the Rome accident in a footnote, but did not identify the flight.
One significant difference between the two TWA 800 accidents was that, as described by eyewitness Capt. Lowell, his center tank explosion blew upward and caused chaos and panic among the surviving passengers; but according to the NTSB the July 17, 1996 TWA 800 explosion did not blow upward into the passenger cabin. Rather, the force was focused forward and downward, which contradicts what appears to be a general consensus about the explosion of hydrocarbon gases like fuel vapor: that they exert force equally in all directions. At Baltimore, NTSB staffer Jim Wildey took the audience of family members, media and industry observers through the breakup sequence, which he said began when the front of the tank gave way. He said that happened within one second, but an FAA specialist who contributed a set of stress calculations told me that a large force would need to be pushing downward for significantly more than one second on an aluminum beam that broke in two beneath the tank called the “keel beam.” A Boeing spokesman told me the keel beam was made of a very strong alloy called 7075 T6, which is officially rated as having a breaking strain of about 50,000 to 70,000 pounds per square inch (psi). The NTSB estimated that a force of only around 20 psi was sufficient to do the damage inside the center tank, by contrast—an extraordinary mismatch.
It’s worth noting that of all the lab and other tests the NTSB conducted on a mixture of Jet A fuel vapor and air that they estimated to have been equivalent to what filled the center tank at the explosion altitude, they could only get it to ignite when they used far more voltage than was available in wiring inside or close to the center tank. At Baltimore the discussions I remember were about the minimum ignition energy necessary for ignition, which was expressed as a number of millijoules, a tiny quantity; but Joe Shepherd, the CalTech researcher who gave the presentation, admitted to me afterward that the ignition energy needed for a fuel/air mixture in the 13,000-plus gallon, almost completely empty center tank would have been greater.
Rob Davey
rj_davey@me.com