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The service will take place on Long Island, New York, more than 260 miles from the 30,000 square foot hangar at the National Transportation Safety Board training center in Ashburn, Va., Where the rebuilt wreckage of the Boeing 747 has been located for over two decades. . The agency, which until last week used the recovered wreckage in crash investigation training courses, is expected to decommission and destroy it in the coming months.
“It’s been very helpful, but I think we’ve gotten to the point now that it’s time to move on, but in a different way,” Frank Hilldrup, an NTSB official who was on the team Original Flight 800 investigators told CNN.
The plane bound for Paris exploded a few minutes after taking off from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on July 17, 1996, killing all 230 people on board. The plane wreckage fell into the waters of the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island. With the help of the Navy as well as contract fishing trawlers scouring the ocean floor, investigators were able to recover more than 95% of the plane and, after nearly a year, the remains of all dead were also recovered.
After a comprehensive four-year investigation, the Hilldrup team determined that the probable cause of the explosion was an electrical short circuit that detonated fumes in the center wing’s fuel tank, although they never determined with certainty where the initial spark came from.
But while the NTSB plans to destroy the reconstructed wreckage by removing and melting or shredding the nearly 1,600 pieces, some people familiar with the disaster say the process will not result in any closures.
“You can never really close the door on it. You can never really put it away,” said John Seaman, whose niece, Michelle Becker, died in the disaster.
Seaman, who says he’s only visited the Reconstruction once, calls it a monument to those who found the truth behind Flight 800.
“This is testament to what happened,” he told CNN. The reconstruction “was impressive and it made me feel good to be an American.”
NTSB chief executive Sharon Bryson also said the impact of Flight 800 will continue long after the wreckage is destroyed.
It may not be “an investigation that you are closing the book on. It has taught us too much and it has changed too much for the book to be closed, at least anytime soon,” she told CNN.
The agency plans to thoroughly document the wreckage over several months using 3D scanning techniques, and the data will be archived for historical purposes before ultimately being destroyed.
Investigators initially suspected foul play
Of the 755 witness reports the FBI has released, accounts vary widely, but hundreds describe what they thought was a flare or fireworks heading towards the plane before it exploded. . Some witnesses even used the words “missile” or “rocket”.
“When you talk about a plane crashing, was it a bomb? Was it a missile? Well, you can see the evidence,” said Peter Goelz, who was the NTSB’s chief executive at the time. of the flight 800 disaster.
Although the agency ultimately considered the explosion an accident and found no evidence of foul play, investigators also considered state-sponsored actors during their investigation, according to Leon Panetta, who was chief. office of President Bill Clinton at the time of the tragedy.
The NTSB said the original agreement with the families of those who died in the crash included a stipulation that the reconstruction would be used only as a training tool and never as a public display, and Bryson said the families had been made aware of the downgrading before the agency. public announcement.
CNN’s Claire Colbert contributed to this report.
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