After 25 years, a 93-foot-long, two-story, white, silver and red aluminum and steel section of a Boeing 747 jetliner is about to be chopped and melted into scrap… This piece of wreckage is being called “Certified destruction.” by the National Transportation Administration.
It’s not just any Boeing, it’s TWA Flight 800, the plane that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean 25 years ago this summer on July 17, 1996. The lost flight claimed the lives of 230 people, along with a number of students and children from Northeastern Pennsylvania…
According to media reports, the government is allowing family to take a final look at the remnants.. only a few so far have taken them up on the offer.
THE SMALL TOWN ROCKED
The sadness in Montoursville Pennsylvania was palpable in the immediate aftermath of the crash of Flight 800..
The fateful flight included 16 members of the Montoursville Area high school French club from and five adult chaperones.
The grief was one of the main stories of the crash, as the town of then 5,000 made global headlines. Media outlets in 1996 reported from the site of the small town, showcasing a close-knit community mourning the loss of adults and children with promising futures..
Within hours after families, who saved money for years to let their children attend this 10 day venture to France, were traveling to the summer shores of Long Island to wait until federal investigators were able to recovery and identify the bodies of their loved ones.
This type of grief was not only existent in Pennsylvania, but in many other towns were the lives of those lost were from.
President Bill Clinton, heading into a 1996 November election, was faced with the task of healing a nation and a federal response that included attempting to investigate what actually brought the plane down.
This AP raw footage taken and filed in July 1996 in the immediate days following the crash showcase the melancholy that descended as a result of the lives lost that during this midsummer nightmare:
When Cecilia Penney first saw the explosion, she thought, “Is this a nuclear war? It was like I was watching it on TV.” Her husband Randy then joined volunteers on a small rescue fleet of six boats. “The water was on fire from the fuel,” he says. Soon he and his friends had “pulled three bodies out of the water; two of them were still strapped to their seats. We had to get them out of there quick because we didn’t want them to sink.” Of the 18 people Randy saw pulled out of the water, about half had had their clothes blown off. One was a pretty girl in her early 20s. “I tried not to get a good look at them, at their faces,” he says hesitantly. “I didn’t have time to think about what I was seeing–we were out there looking for survivors. And by about 3 a.m., it became apparent there were none.”
THE IMMEDIATE THEORIES
While media outlets in 2021 paint theories about the crashing of Flight 800 with a broad “conspiracy” label, it’s worth noting that the investigation into the crash didn’t officially conclude for four years. And even after that, many experts and even whistleblowers questioned the final results. More on that later.
But where did the conspiracy theories start? Mainstream media itself!
The crash was a mystery, with news sources reporting a varying amount of allegations that included everything from accidental mishaps to a missile or bomb..
The New York TIMES, the old gray lady itself, published this July 21, 1996 collection of the potential theories of what brought down TWA Flight 800:
Also on the same day, a number of headlines blared interesting theories based on what divers were finding. On July 21, the York Sunday News in YORK PA blazed this banner on A10:
The story reported included facts taken from wire dispatches, including bodies being found with severe burns on ankles .. that was evidence, some said at that time, that a bomb exploded in the fuselage
. Within only hours of the crash, major networks had on theorists (then not conspiracy by title) who were wondering if a missile strike accidentally hit the Boeing..
THE INVESTIGATION
The mystery of this tragic event was long-lasting. And even after NTSB and other federal agencies concluded it was accidental, others continue to argue the opposite.
The official investigation took four years.
This is what the Allentown Morning CALL reporting on August 23, 2000, when the federal agencies finally closed the official inquiry: A fuel tank brought down flight 800.
The National Transportation Safety Board said at the time that an explosion of vapors in a fuel tank was the “inescapable” fact that brought down the plane. But even though official word was not to be doubted, the statement went on that investigators “can not be certain” that it was an electrical short in the wiring of the tank.
The case was closed.
Kind of?
CONTROVERSY AFTER CLOSING
Long after the crash, theories abounded as the internet began to take hold across the globe. Websites and message boards made it easier for people to create content questioning the official narrative presented by federal investigators.
While the September 11th attacks subdued the theories for a bit, it was not quelled for good.
Reputable doubters persisted questioning this official narrative.
The missile theory was the most common among those that did not agree with the final verdict.
In 2013, a documentary called simply TWA FLIGHT 800 premiered on various platforms alleging that the case was not closed… And it included six former members of the official crash investigation that stepped forward to refute the NTSB’s findings, saying the crash report was purposefully falsified, and to claim the investigation was “systematically undermined” by federal authorities!
Even in the aftermath of the crash, and prior to the final report, the FBI released various statements quietly on the Internet showcasing statements about a ‘streak of light’..
One eyewitness, for instance, described “what he thought was a shooting star traveling west to east, coming form the south shore, over Fire Island,” an FBI agent wrote. The “object he observed was more like a bottle-rocket with a dull orange glow to it” and he “further stated that the glow moved faster than an aircraft.”
Yet another witness on Long Island’s south shore said she observed “what appeared to be a ‘contrail’ which appeared to be coming from an object which was flying toward the plane which she had been watching,” according to another FBI record. That eyewitness said she thought the object originated from somewhere on the ocean.
Archived witness statements still exist online here: http://twa800.com/witnesscd/witnesscd.htm
MSNBC
MSNBC is much more widely known now (but maybe still not widely watched) compared to when it just began operations in 1996.. But that night of disaster was considered a major PR disaster for the network!
This was written by LA TIMES media critic Howard Roseberg on July 19, 1996:
Newborn MSNBC–the enormously ambitious cable news-and-information network created by NBC and Microsoft Corp.–faced its first severe test when Flight 800 exploded and crashed off the coast of Long Island, killing all of its 230 passengers and crew and leaving bodies and debris bobbing in fuel-flamed waters.
The scene was not much prettier inside the Fort Lee, N.J., studios of MSNBC, which for several hours Wednesday sought to pull out of its own fiery nose dive. “Stay with us,” apologetic anchor Brian Williams urged viewers after 40 minutes of fumbling crash coverage in which little went right and the nation’s newest network of record appeared astonishingly unready for live coverage of such a calamity. Williams promised: “We’re gonna try to do better.”
MSNBC did do better that evening, only its third on the air. But it took some time, during which MSNBC often gave the impression of being up and running on legs presently meant only for crawling, that it was too hastily launched to coincide with its NBC parent’s coverage of the Summer Olympics.
In striking contrast to MSNBC’s floundering, disaster-tested CNN (been there, done that) was grand in those critical early hours when information about the crash of the Boeing jumbo jet was especially thin and fragmentary, a situation it had faced often in its 16-year history.
It was true.. the chaos of the moment caught this network off guard as much as the nation. Despite the station being tuned in with the new “Internet” (MS is Microsoft) Brian Williams was forced to show Rand McNalley maps during the broadcast as to where the flight went down:
Also reported at the end of the piece:
On Thursday morning, President Clinton called TV cameras to the White House to urge the nation and its teeming hive of pundits to await “the evidence” before leaping to conclusions about the crash. Yet waiting was increasingly hard to do, given the circumstances. Seconds after the president’s plea, CBS News correspondent Jim Stewart was on with Dan Rather, reporting that his FBI sources believe that “terrorists are to blame.” And that evening on ABC’s “World News Tonight” there was talk of a possible missile, a mysterious radar blip and an Islamic group’s warning of a “strike at an American target” in a fax received Wednesday by an Arabic newspaper.
There is very LITTLE footage of MSNBC coverage of Flight 800 on Youtube, with the exception of this:
THE ODDITIES AND HORRORS
The AP reported this in July 1996:
EAST MORICHES, N.Y. (AP) _ The coroner said today he doubts that TWA Flight 800 passengers experienced the horror of a free fall and thinks most suffered an almost instantaneous death.
“I don’t think anybody was conscious as they fell from 13,000 feet to the water. When the explosion occurred, some may have had a sudden panic attack for maybe one or two seconds. But I believe they were all totally unconscious or dead by the time they hit the water,″ said Dr. Charles Wetli, the Suffolk County medical examiner in charge of autopsies conducted on 196 crash victims.
“The majority lost consciousness instantly when the blast went off,″ he said.
Another strange addition to history includes this flight attendant who claimed to have pre-cognition warnings of the crash:
THE DESTRUCTION OF FLIGHT 800
After 25 years, all of the controversy, and to some unanswered questions, it comes down to the wreckage that was recovered.. not sitting on the cement floor of a hangar-like warehouse on an auxiliary science campus of George Washington University.
The fuselage was reconstructed by the NTSB, with more than 1,000 chunks — some dented or peeled or charred — that were eventually pieced together like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle on a steel skeleton. Some of the pieces were found floating in the Atlantic across a search area that stretched for miles. Some were pulled from the ocean floor by U.S. Navy divers.
The process was so painstaking that investigators actually placed rows of seats in their correct spots inside the fuselage.
“Some families know the seat assignments,” said Sharon Bryson, a former NTSB victims assistance specialist who is now the agency’s managing director.
In some cases, Bryson said, families ask the NTSB to place bouquets of flowers on seats that were assigned to their loved ones. But in recent years the number of contacts with families has dropped dramatically — to less than half a dozen in the last decade, she said.
Also from the USA TODAY article on dismantling what was recovered:
The NTSB’s “decommissioning” of the fuselage in the warehouse is so secret that it is being managed like a military operation. The ultimate goal is to melt, slice, dice and otherwise eviscerate the 60,000-pound section of the jetliner — including passengers’ seats — into bits and pieces so unrecognizable that profiteers won’t be able to sell it.
“We don’t want any of this turning up on eBay,” said NTSB spokesman Christopher T. O’Neil. “When all is said and done, there will be nothing that can be used as an artifact of TWA 800. There’s not going to be anything that can be exploited.”
The NTSB even promised families of victims that it won’t allow pieces of the wreckage to be donated to a museum.
There are ghosts that haunt us even 25 years later.. those strong emotions that bring back that sense of sadness that was experienced that night.
When Flight 800 crashed into the ocean, by accident or whatever, I was 15 years old. A newbie on the planet.. but a newbie like so many of those who died that night ..
What would their lives have been ? What would they have become…
What promises of the future existed for people taken so brutally from our planet ..?
We will never know.
And 25 years later.. the pain is still real for many. Too many…
