TWA Flight 800 wreckage to be destroyed years after explosion

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All 230 people on the flight to Paris were killed. The Boeing 747 was destroyed and the wreckage fell in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Long Island, New York.

The reconstructed wreckage has been used in crash investigation training courses for nearly 20 years, the NTSB said in a statement Monday.

With the help of the Navy and contract fishing trawlers scouring the ocean floor, investigators were able to recover more than 95 percent of the plane. After almost a year, the remains of the 230 dead were also found.

As part of the investigation, the NTSB reconstructed a 93-foot segment of the aircraft’s fuselage, which took dozens of people working for months to piece together the literal parts to help understand what happened to the aircraft. flight 800 TWA.

The partially reconstructed fuselage of TWA flight 800 was pulled out of a hangar in Calverton, New York on September 14, 1999.
After a comprehensive four-year investigation, the NTSB determined that the probable cause of the explosion was an electrical short circuit that detonated fumes in the center wing fuel tank, although it did not never definitively determined where the initial spark came from.
Prior to their findings, law enforcement officials and others suspected the explosion may not have been accidental. One of the reasons was that some witnesses said they saw something heading towards the plane before it exploded; others said they observed a trail of light and a fireball, which raised suspicions that terrorists hit the plane with a rocket. Investigators concluded that the footage likely burned fuel from the aircraft’s wing tank.

After the investigation, the rebuilt aircraft was moved to a 30,000 square foot hangar at the NTSB training center in Ashburn, Virginia.

However, its days of training assistance will soon come to an end as the agency prepares for the expiration of the training center’s lease. With advancements in technology – including 3D scanning and drone imaging – there is no longer a need for large-scale reconstruction.

The NTSB has said it will stop using the reconstruction on July 7, 2021, just before the 25th anniversary of the crash. After that, the reconstruction will be carefully documented over the course of several months using 3D scanning techniques, and the data will be archived for historical purposes before the wreckage is finally destroyed.

The NTSB said the original agreement with the families of those who died in the crash included a stipulation that the reconstruction would only be used as a training tool and never as a public display.

“To honor this agreement reached with the families of the victims of the TWA 800 flight, the NTSB will work closely with a federal government contractor to dismantle the reconstruction and destroy the wreckage,” the NTSB statement read.

NTSB chief executive Sharon Bryson said the families had been notified of the downgrade and “learned our decision directly from the NTSB before our public announcement.”

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