Jul 17, 2006 7:53 am US/Eastern
TWA Flight 800: 10 Years After
SHIRLEY, N.Y. (CBS/AP) ―
It was just after 8:30 p.m. at the end of a blistering July day in 1996. Only a few minutes after taking off from JFK, TWA Flight 800, a jumbo jet carrying students, honeymooners, businessmen and others to Paris, exploded in a fireball, raining burning debris into the Atlantic Ocean off the Long Island coastline.
Departure To Disaster: Timeline of Flight 800Initially, investigators were not sure if the disaster that killed
all 230 people aboard on July 17, 1996, was caused by a bomb, a missile or mechanical failure.
The accident was only two days before the start of the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, and foul play was on everyone's mind.
CBS News Interactive: Air DisastersToday, 10 years later, many still question the official explanation, reached in 2000, that Flight 800 was destroyed by a center fuel-tank explosion -- likely caused by a spark from a short-circuit in the Boeing 747's wiring that ignited the tank's volatile vapors.
TWA Flight 800: Fuel Tank Safeguards ProposedSo has TWA 800 become one of history's mysteries, much the way people debate the JFK assassination? Like most things, it depends on which person you ask.
Aug. 24, 2000: NTSB Concludes TWA Flight 800 Probe"It really could have happened," said Mona Morfis of Ronkonkoma on recent visit with her grandchildren to a seaside memorial garden that pays tribute to the victims and their rescuers. "I think it could have been somebody shooting at the plane or it could have been a terrorist attack."
The man who spent years leading the federal investigation into the crash has no such doubts.
"It's horse----," says Robert Francis, the former vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, who still gets missives urging him to come clean about witnesses claiming they saw a streak of light heading toward the jet -- or those who believe the plane was downed by terrorists.
Now retired and living in McLean, Va., Francis still gets "very insulting e-mails, asking me when am I going to tell the truth and asking why am I lying." He never responds.
For weeks and months after the crash, Francis was one of the two "faces" of the government's investigation, along with James Kallstrom, the head of the New York office of the FBI, offering regular updates on the probe. Because Flight 800 disintegrated into pieces in the ocean -- making for a months-long recovery effort -- Francis said there was ample time for conspiracy theories to flourish.
"There was no ability to make a determination quickly," he said. "We were picking up the wreckage in 130 feet of water."
Still, he said, investigators wanted to follow the evidence, not the speculators. Investigators eventually recovered 98 percent of the wreckage from the ocean floor and painstakingly rebuilt a large part of the airliner.
"We studied if it had been a missile, what would it have done to the fuselage? We had scientists in the desert shooting rockets into old fuselages," he said in a recent telephone interview. "We didn't find a single piece of wreckage that would have pointed to that kind of explosion. So I say to the missile theorists, 'Show me something."'
Navy Ship To Blame?Another theory was that a missile from a Navy ship 200 miles away took down the jetliner, but Francis questioned why no one on the cruiser -- whose crews usually number in the hundreds -- ever came forward. "There are pay phones on the deck. You mean to tell me everybody kept their mouths shut?"
He said recovery of crash debris also included a search for evidence of a shoulder-fired missile from a terrorist. "We never found any of that," he said. "They searched every marina, every wharf."
In the end, he said the definitive answer to the mystery was the center fuel tank.
Doubts About InvestigationWhy did so many people have doubts?
"It's more acceptable to the public if somebody did this, rather than blame it on maintenance or design," said Pete Field, a retired Marine Corps pilot from Missouri who now works as an aviation crash consultant.
He said witnesses who claimed to have seen streaks of light heading toward the doomed jetliner were actually seeing the plane breaking up after the catastrophe -- the official theory offered by the NTSB.
"You see trails [of light] and it's easy to get your mind confused," he said. "I do accident investigations all the time and I find that the mind traps an image, even if it's not there. Even some aviation experts will tell you they saw something that just could not have happened."
Eileen Best, who tends to the garden at the TWA 800 Memorial at Smith Point County Park, said many visitors have shared their doubts about the official findings when they travel through the garden, which has massive black stone tablets that tell the story of the victims and their rescuers.
"Many people on Long Island still have doubts," she said as she prepared the garden for a planned 10-year commemoration on July 17.
While the memorial honors the 230 people from 14 countries who perished, the hundreds of police officers, firefighters, rescue workers and boaters who raced to the fiery scene are also recognized.
Heroes Of Flight 800 & 9/11Two men who became better known for their roles on Sept. 11, 2001, are also considered heroes by the families of the TWA 800 victims.
A bench at the memorial is dedicated to the Rev. Mychal Judge, the New York Fire Department chaplain who was on duty on July 17, 1996, and acted as a counselor to the mourners for years afterward. Six weeks before he became the first official victim of Sept. 11, Judge joined relatives at a ceremony marking the crash's fifth anniversary.
"Every year that you come here, you make this spot more blessed and more sacred if that's possible," Judge said.
Before he became known as "America's Mayor" for his actions on Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani was one of the first public officials to race to the side of the mourners, acting as both an advocate and source of comfort for the families who gathered at a nearby hotel.
On the first anniversary of the crash, he repeated words to mourners at St. Patrick's Cathedral that he first said to the relatives and friends of the 16 high school students and five chaperones from Montoursville, Pa., who died in the crash:
"For me personally, I can tell you that until the day I die, I will never forget the experience of Flight 800.
"I will certainly never forget the loss of good friends, the tragedy, the pain, the grief. But most important, I will never forget the love that you all displayed and continue to display for each other. It really has reminded me of the strength of our lives."
Slideshow: Remembering TWA Flight 800
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