Death in Midair

A CIA simulation recreates the moment Flight 800 exploded. See below for the simulation link.

(Central Intelligence Agency)

Ten years ago today, 16 excited students from Montoursville, Pennsylvania, all members of their high school French club, were on their way to visit Paris. The jumbo jet they were to ride, TWA Flight 800 out of New York’s Kennedy Airport, was an hour late taking off. Thirteen minutes into its flight, it exploded in midair. The 16 young people were among the 230 passengers and crew members who perished.

The explosion of TWA 800 shocked a nation already on edge. It touched off the most comprehensive investigation of any airline disaster in history. Yet in spite of years of painstaking effort, no definitive cause for the crash was ever found. Even a decade later, the incident continues to generate dark rumors of conspiracy and cover-up.

The pilot, Steven Snyder, led an experienced flight crew as the 231-foot-long Boeing 747 lumbered down the runway at 8:18 p.m. on July 17, 1996, and began to climb into a clear sky. The craft soared eastward to a point over the Atlantic Ocean a few miles south of Long Island. To witnesses on the ground, the 747, at almost 14,000 feet, would have appeared as a small spot, barely recognizable as a jumbo jet.

Suddenly all communication from the plane ceased, and the voice cockpit recorder went dead. An explosion severed the section of the plane in front of the wings. The nose and cockpit began to tumble toward the water two and a half miles below. The plane’s engines drove the rest of the aircraft into a steep, 3,000-foot climb. Some passengers were ejected while still in their seats.

Finally the jet’s fuel erupted into a massive fireball, which some onlookers thought was a pyrotechnic display. Debris and fuel rained down, creating a scene from Hieronymus Bosch below—a sea of flames clogged with wreckage, bodies, and parts of bodies.

The possibility of terrorism loomed large. The terrorist Ramsi Yousef had contemplated an attack that would have brought down multiple jumbo jets using onboard bombs. Yousef was then on trial in New York for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The opening of the Atlanta Olympics, only days away, also raised the level of alertness. “We were in an extremely high state of threat,” said James Kallstrom, who headed the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe of the accident.

The National Transportation Safety Board led the investigation. But with only 400 employees, that agency was ill-prepared for the scope of the inquiry into TWA 800. The FBI quickly sent hundreds of agents into the field to interview the many witnesses who had seen the crash. Some reported observing a streak of light intercept the plane just before the explosion. A radar operator also reported that something seemed to have homed in on the aircraft before it went down.

Speculation flared. Had Flight 800 been shot down by a shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile? Had a U.S. military exercise gone tragically awry? Had someone planted a bomb on board?

Most of the physical evidence rested under 120 feet of water. The government decided to bring up as much of the debris as possible, an effort that required months of work by divers and dredgers. In a Long Island hangar, experts carefully reconstructed the plane from its pieces, some of them barely four inches square.

The Boeing 747 that went down that day was 25 years old, a senior citizen of the aviation world. Engineers had designed the plane for long-distance flight by including a large center fuel tank between the wings. Because the extra fuel would not be needed for the hop to Paris, maintenance workers had filled just the wing tanks at Kennedy. Only fifty gallons of fuel remained in the center tank.

NTSB detectives eventually came to the conclusion that the heat given off by air conditioners under the center tank evaporated the jet fuel inside and created an explosive vapor. Something touched off this volatile gas, breaking open the plane and causing the catastrophe that followed. “The source of ignition energy for the explosion could not be determined with certainty,” the board’s report admitted, but it was probably an electrical surge or short circuit.

“Right from the start, a fuel-air explosion was considered a possibility,” said Merritt Birky, the NTSB’s expert on fire and explosions.

This mechanical explanation failed to satisfy government critics. Pierre Salinger, who had been press secretary to President John F. Kennedy, was among many who publicly subscribed to the theory that a missile had downed the plane; he believed it was accidental friendly fire by the Navy. Theorists wrote books picking apart the 1999 NTSB report on the crash. Numerous alternative explanations were put forth, including a malfunction caused by a burst of electromagnetic interference.

In 1990 the British aviation journalist Steven Barlay had noted, “There are no new types of air crashes—only people with short memories.” TWA 800, if it was brought down by a fuel-tank explosion, was not the first aircraft to meet that fate. In 1963 a Boeing 707 crashed near Philadelphia, killing 81, after its center fuel tank exploded. Forty-nine more died in Rome the year after when a TWA jet exploded.

The problem of dangerous fuel-air mixtures had been studied and discussed in the industry for decades. The airlines and the plane manufacturers had repeatedly contended that the problem did not require an expensive fix; the Federal Aviation Authority had agreed. Aircraft makers, prodded by new FAA regulations, have since begun a process of outfitting jetliners with systems designed to reduce the danger of this kind of explosion.

The Flight 800 crash left behind two lessons. The first was that conspiracy theories, fueled by suspicion and by the government’s own lack of candor, will develop wherever they can. Whether it’s speculation about the Kennedy assassination or about the attacks of September 11, Americans have loudly taken advantage of their right to question the official version. It is a venerable tradition in a free society.

The other lesson is that streaking through the sky at 500 miles an hour is an inherently risky business and always will be. Decades of engineering and regulation have cut that risk to an impressive minimum. But the tragic fate of Flight 800 shows that nothing will bring it to zero.

Click here for the simulaton video.

—Jack Kelly writes often for American Heritage magazine and is the author of Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics—A History of the Explosive That Changed the World (Basic Books).