NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — Saturday marks 25 years since one of America’s deadliest aviation accidents claimed the lives of 230 people off the coast of Long Island.
On July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 departed JFK International Airport for Paris. The flight left Queens at around 8:30 p.m. and just 12 minutes after takeoff, the aircraft’s fuel tank exploded over the Atlantic Ocean.
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The aircraft went plunging into the waters below and everyone on board – including 18 crew members, 20 off-duty employees and 16 students on a field trip – were killed in the crash, making it the third-deadliest aviation accident in U.S. history.
In this week’s 880 In Depth Podcast, we look back on that day and what has changed since.
First, we spoke with CBS Travel Editor Peter Greenberg and asked him how aviation safety has improved over the years since the tragedy.
“The military knew for years about corrosion in fuel tanks and in fact, they had a better program to fix that than commercial aviation. So as a result of the investigation of TWA Flight 800, there was a clear and compelling case to redo the manuals for further inspection of the center fuel tanks,” Greenberg said. “It took a while but now they are doing it. And they’re doing it much more aggressively and, as you may have noticed, we haven’t had a situation since.”
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We also spoke with former New York State Gov. George Pataki, who was in his first term and had only been in office for 18 months when the tragedy struck.
He told WCBS 880 that what stuck with him most about that day was the scope and depth of the loss. Pataki notes that he could never have foreseen something like that happening.
“You prepare to be governor and I knew state issues and policies extremely well, but to deal with the human suffering of that magnitude as we saw with TWA 800, it's just something that you have to experience, you can't be prepared for it,” the former governor said.
Pataki says that day also helped teach him and many others not to jump to conclusions.
“Everybody wants an answer, and you want the answer the next day, not a year from now. But you just have to avoid the temptation to give an answer you might think is correct at the time, but you don't have enough facts to confirm,” he said.
We also spoke with Heidi Snow, a woman who lost her fiancé, French hockey player Michel Breistroff, on TWA Flight 880.
Snow told WCBS 880 that Breistroff had proposed to her the night before he boarded the flight and recalled being in a state of shock on the day of the crash.
“I still remember that day so well. Every moment of it. He called just before he boarded the plane. At the final boarding announcement, we exchanged our final ‘I love yous’ and then he said he would call when he arrived in Paris,” Snow said. “About a half hour later, I get a call from my mother saying, ‘Please tell me that Michel wasn’t going to Paris tonight.’ And I just remember turning on the TV to the Flight 800 debris burning on the dark Atlantic Ocean and I just remember my mind racing.”
Snow says she was unsure what to do in the aftermath, but she wanted to talk to somebody who might understand what she was going through, and thought others might as well.
Because of that, she started an organization that could connect families with others who also lost loved ones in plane crashes, and found a way to use her own trauma to counsel others.
“Our organization grew just out of need as time went on and now, we have an amazing network of 250 trained grief mentors who have all lost people in past incidents, who are on call for families of more recent ones and that still goes on,” Snow said. “And from that I actually also wrote a book. I started interviewing the families so that way we could have another way to make sure people could learn how to get through their losses from the moment it happens to how they take the next step in their lives.”
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