NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — The wreckage from one of America’s worst air disasters is about to be dismantled and destroyed.
On July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 departed John F. Kennedy International Airport at around 8:30 p.m. for Rome, with a layover in Paris.
About 12 minutes after takeoff, however, the fuel tank exploded, causing the aircraft to go crashing into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Long Island.
All 230 people on board, including 18 crew and 20 off-duty employees, were killed in the crash, making it the third-deadliest aviation accident in U.S. history.
Not long after the crash, the wrecked fuselage was recovered and pieced back together by the National Transportation Safety Board. For 25 years, that pieced-together wreckage has been stored in a hangar and at times, used as a training tool.
However, the NTSB announced that it will soon be dismantling the wreckage and finally laying the structure to rest.
Mike Kelly, longtime columnist at The Record and NorthJersey.com, extensively covered the TWA Flight 800 crash and explains that the wreckage is now being dismantled because of a leasing issue.
“The building that the National Transportation Safety Board is using, the rent is expiring so, they've got to figure out what to do with this gigantic fuselage. But the National Transportation Safety Board told me that they didn't really need it anymore. They had photographed it so well and they had so many different ways of presenting this fuselage on a computer, for example, that they could actually teach some of their investigators in that way.
So, they felt that they were able to just get rid of these large pieces of fuselage and they're going to do it in such a way that it's unrecognizable and untraceable,” Kelly said.
The plan now is to create a 3D model of the fuselage that will be used by the NTSB in future training procedures, according to Kelly.
He stresses that the NTSB is also not planning to donate or sell any pieces of the wreckage to any museums or aviation enthusiasts.
“You're not going to see pieces of this fuselage turning up on eBay or there are not going to be memorial coins made from the pieces of the fuselage,” he said. “This is going into scrap and it'll never be seen again.”
He notes that decision was likely made because the aircraft was involved in such a deadly tragedy.
“This is a death chamber, so to speak. This is a place where 230 people perished in a horrible, horrible way and I think rightly so, the National Transportation Safety Board is saying, ‘We don't want these pieces in museums or in somebody's personal collection somewhere.’ And so, they're going to great lengths – it's almost like a secret military operation,” Kelly said.
The victims’ families have been allowed to visit the fuselage over the years, and some have even left mementos on the seats that their family members were assigned to.
It remains unclear when families will have the final opportunity to view the fuselage before it is disassembled.
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