Flight 800: Anatomy of Tragedy

EAST MORICHES, N.Y. —  In the beginning, against the odds, against all practical reason, they elected to hope.

Offshore, dusk had begun to fall. Lt. Kevin Dunn, commander of the 110-foot Coast Guard patrol boat Adak, was talking to a fishing boat on the radio telephone when he saw “a huge fireball and a line of flames, bigger than fireworks, bigger than any flare.”

“I’m coming up to 30 knots,” Dunn announced over the ship’s intercom, the Coast Guard equivalent of “battle stations.” Then he pointed the Adak’s bow toward the conflagration and ordered his crew to pull together emergency medical kits, blankets, food and drinking water for survivors.

Several miles away, at a marina nestled on the bank of Mud Creek, Ed Probst and his buddies had gathered in the broad cockpit of Probst’s 29-foot Luhrs sportfishing boat to consider the fine points of “chunking tuna.” When word spread along the docks that a plane had gone down offshore, Probst’s friends hurriedly gathered portable spotlights, boat hooks and extra life jackets from nearby boats while he prepared to cast off.

Mud Creek, thick with docks and moorings, is a “no wake” zone with a 5 mph speed limit, but Probst considered only a moment before thrusting down the throttles on the Luhr’s twin 350-horsepower engines. In minutes, the South Bound had cleared the channel and joined a Dunkirk-like flotilla of boats of every size and description, all racing to the rescue.

“My boat will do 30 miles an hour at full throttle and we were going 30 that night,” he said later.

The hopes that led the fishermen to gather up extra life jackets, like those that moved the Adak’s crew to assemble medical kits and blankets--did not survive long in the reality they found. The smoke and flames that lay over the water were a curtain over the gates of perdition. None who entered were fully prepared for what awaited them.

Two white gloves floating side by side, looking at first like someone’s hands. The plane’s rudder rising and falling with the swell, tail number and a painted American flag shining out of the gloom. Helicopters swarming so close to the surface that Dunn repeatedly ordered them back so the boats could maneuver. A welter of clothing, luggage, paper cups, seat cushions, shapeless objects so thick it looked as though “someone had dumped a landfill,” one volunteer said. And the bodies, some so torn that rescuers were embarrassed to be looking at them and others seemingly unmarked--staring up from the water, eyes open but life gone away.

“When we first got there, we didn’t see any bodies,” Coast Guardsman Jeff Ruggieri, 27, of Hemet, Calif., recalled. “Then you saw one. Then another. They were just floating there. . . . I thought a lot about my wife and two kids.” Someone on Probst’s boat began to shout, “It looks like a kid. It looks like a kid,” and Probst remembered hoping it wasn’t.

There would be no dramatic rescues to send the heart soaring this night.

Only frightful evidence of the fragility of the human body, the flotsam and jetsam thrown up when ordinary lives are interrupted, sights rescuers knew even then would return and return in their minds--unbidden, unwelcome.

And looming over everything was the dreadful thought that all this might not be an incomprehensible act of God, just tragic happenstance. It might, instead, have been a patiently planned and achieved act of other human beings. “Terrorism,” in the mind-bending shorthand of the age.

The destruction of TWA Flight 800 at 8:31.10 p.m., Eastern Daylight Time on July 17, 1996, snapped off the lives of 230 passengers and crew. It tore irreparable holes in the lives of relatives and friends. It catapulted hundreds of government officials, political leaders, law enforcement agents, aviation experts and others into an ordeal that would test not only professional skill but personal judgment and character as well.

For investigators at least, Flight 800 began the day before as Flight 881, departing Hellenikon International Airport in Athens for New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport at 8:40 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, July 17. An officer on that flight later said security seemed tight, and Greek government officials said passengers’ identification was checked, hand luggage examined and additional protective steps taken by a private security firm.

But Athens, with its proximity to the Middle East and its diverse population, had always been a potential trouble spot. In March, the Federal Aviation Administration had cited Hellenikon for failing to meet adequate security standards, although the warning was lifted in May.

In any event, the flight to JFK appeared uneventful and nothing out of the ordinary was recorded during the hours that the venerable 747, first commissioned in 1971, spent on the ground after landing. True, the scheduled 7 p.m. departure from New York was delayed by a small mechanical problem and a mix-up matching a piece of luggage with a passenger.

But when Flight 800 pushed back from the gate at 8:02 p.m. EDT, the takeoff data seemed routine. Total weight, at 590,441 pounds (including 176,600 pounds of fuel), was well below the 734,000-pound maximum. Liftoff to the southwest on Runway 22-Right occurred normally at 8:19 p.m. The weather was clear, the temperature an unremarkable 71 degrees. Winds were light from the south-southwest, visibility an ample 25 miles.

The plane turned northeast just off the Long Island coast, lumbering gently up to 13,700 feet.

At 8:30:19 p.m., the pilots acknowledged clearance to climb to 15,000 feet. This and other radio communications “indicate a routine flight with no abnormalities reported,” according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

Then, at 8:31:10 p.m., the luminescent dot that represented Flight 800 on traffic control radar disappeared. There was no frantic radio message, no emergency alarm. At 8:31:11, the dot was just not there.

Lt. Bill Rypka was the duty officer that night in the Coast Guard’s Boston command center, which oversees operations from the Canadian border south to Shrewsbury River, N.J. Ranged around him were computerized charts, a radio telephone for contacting ships at sea, a 10-line telephone and other equipment. But it had been a quiet evening, and he was filling out reports when one of the phone lights blinked on.

It was the air-traffic control center. “The controller came on and said we have an airplane that went off radar,” Rypka said later. “He was really shaken up. There was a definite quiver in his voice. . . . He said, ‘We need everything you’ve got.’ ”

Rypka, 38, of Sandwich, Mass., first dispatched a helicopter and a jet from Cape Cod, Mass.--where they are on call 24 hours a day--plus a second chopper from Brooklyn, N.Y. Then he ran down the hall to wake up Petty Officer Randy Graves.

“Randy, I need you,” Rypka said.

*

Normally, a field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is headed by a special agent in charge, but the New York City office is so important and so much larger than any of the other 56 offices that James K. Kallstrom, who presides over it, holds the rank of assistant director in charge.

Kallstrom, a burly man with a full face and heavy black hair, was at the Friars Club in mid-town Manhattan for a dinner honoring former New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, who had just been appointed undersecretary of the Treasury for law enforcement. “We were celebrating his promotion,” Kallstrom said later. “In fact, all of the law enforcement leaders in New York City were there. And we were just walking out of the place where the dinner was, and I bet it was two minutes and all our beepers went off.”

The facts relayed by the duty officer in the bureau’s headquarters in Foley Square were sketchy but stark. Kallstrom turned his car toward the office, red roof light flashing.

“On the phone in the car I called the director of the FBI,” Louis J. Freeh, Kallstrom said. “He said, ‘Get a handle on it.’ ”

The next call went to New York Police Commissioner Howard Safir, who was in his own car. “We’re going to activate the joint terrorist task force. We’ll probably need your scuba people and your boats,” Kallstrom told Safir.

“I also called my wife and said I wouldn’t be home. And she was upset. She knew we had this friend on the plane.” The friend--a senior flight attendant with TWA--was the wife of one of his agents. “It was just too much.”

Finally, Kallstrom called his immediate subordinates to set in motion an off-the-shelf operations plan for such an event. In the back of his mind were the World Trade Center bombing and the trial (being held just across the street from his office) of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the alleged mastermind of the trade center bombing and of an aborted plan to blow up a dozen U.S. jumbo jets over the Pacific in 1995--a scheme prosecutors say could have killed more than 4,000 people.

Based on the initial descriptions, “the logical thing to consider was that it could be a terrorist attack,” he said. A baseline investigation must begin at once, before witnesses’ recollections had a chance to fade. “If you don’t do that, you’re going to lose all that perishable information,” he said.

By 1 a.m., a local command center was up and running in Long Island, complete with telephones and computers.

*

Barely 15 minutes after TWA Flight 800 exploded, warning signals went off at federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies in Washington. On the fifth floor of the fortress-like J. Edgar Hoover Building, the FBI’s Strategic Information Operations Center was already running nearly flat-out because of the Olympics and the June terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. airmen.

But when the TWA call came in, about 20 additional specialists were summoned and the forensics lab was put on alert.

Meantime, on the seventh floor of the Central Intelligence Agency’s sprawling headquarters in Langley, Va., an officer in the Counter-Terrorist Center heard the news on television. He called CIA Director John M. Deutch and other senior officials, who telephoned the White House Situation Room. A duty officer there notified President Clinton.

Within minutes, the CIA had sent cables to all station chiefs around the world asking them to review their recent contacts to see whether they could shed any light on who might have caused the crash.

At the State Department, the senior watch officer in the cramped operations center got his call from FAA officials about 8:45 p.m. Almost immediately, State Department officials formed their own working group. Within hours, they delivered a passenger manifest to the French Embassy.

About 9:30 p.m., the president’s press secretary, Mike McCurry, reminded all agencies to stay in step with the White House response: It’s too early to say what caused the crash, and we don’t want to speculate prematurely.

Behind the scenes, however, a special 10-agency task force on counter-terrorism already was pooling information and theories, using eavesdropping-proof video-teleconferencing equipment.

*

Supper was over and Gina Trombetta and her sister Angela Ruggiero were on the porch of their gray-shingled, two-family house across the street from the beach in West Hampton, Long Island. Their young children were feeding the ducks in Moriches Bay, but the two women happened to turn toward the Atlantic.

“It was the light that caught our attention, a little dot of light in the sky,” Trombetta said. “First we saw this light coming down in an arch. Then it came straight down. It became a fireball, then a huge fan of flames. It was so big. It was much larger than the size of the sun.”

Filled with dread, they crossed to the beach. “We were peering over the dunes and there was nothing there,” Trombetta said. “If there hadn’t been smoke over the water, I would have thought I had imagined it.”

*

There was no question of imagining it for Ed Probst and his friends on the South Bound. They had wandered into a nightmare before they could even think of turning back. The smell of jet fuel was all but overpowering. The air was filled with smoke, garishly illuminated here and there by the arc lights of helicopters.

The first victim Probst and his companions encountered turned out not to be a child, but a woman who had suffered terrible damage to limbs and head. Somehow, all her clothes had been torn off. Putting on work gloves, they got her onto the wooden swim platform extending out from the boat’s stern.

The second body, also a woman, they managed to pull into the cockpit. “We put her face down and put a white blanket over her. Her hand was sticking out from under the blanket. She had a gold bracelet and rings on her fingers. I remember that. It made her seem like a real person,” Probst said.

Working at the edge of exhaustion, they pulled two more bodies onto the swim platform. An Army Corps of Engineers boat came up and offered to take remains. But when a crewman proposed that they put each body into a garbage can so it could be hoisted up with the ship’s crane, Probst rebelled.

“Forget it,” he yelled. “You can come and get them or I’m leaving.”

Probst veered off and set a course for the Coast Guard station on East Moriches Bay, joining a motley fleet of boats on the same grim mission. It was 5 a.m. Thursday. For the return trip, the South Bound’s powerful engines had to run slowly: Something was tangled in the prop.

It turned out to be a black dress.

Shortly after 4 a.m., two tour buses left Montoursville, Pa., bearing frightened, already heartbroken parents and relatives of 16 student members of the high school French Club and five chaperons who had boarded Flight 800 for a once-in-a-lifetime field trip. The same buses and the same drivers had taken the students to JFK on Wednesday.

*

The first six bodies arrived at the Sidney B. Weinberg Center for Forensic Sciences before dawn. Catastrophes are cruel in small ways as well as large, and the events of Thursday were unkind to Dr. Charles V. Wetli, the chief medical examiner for Suffolk County.

Predominantly suburban and rural, Suffolk County had equipped the medical examiner with five fixed autopsy tables and a morgue with 20 storage units. The staff numbered five pathologists including the chief; five autopsies normally meant a busy day.

Before this day ended, 100 bodies had arrived, sealed in plastic body bags along with any clothing or possessions recovered with them. A procession of refrigerated trucks was moving 30 miles up the Long Island Expressway from the Coast Guard dock. Unaccountably, however, Wetli, a respected forensic pathologist whose resume included work with hurricane victims in Dade County, Fla., resisted offers of assistance from the outside.

And as the refrigerated trucks began to clot the parking area and desperate families demanded information, New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and New York Gov. George Pataki stepped forward to attack Wetli and TWA executives for incompetence and inhumanity.

A mild man of medium build with thinning hair, the medical examiner compounded his problems by making public statements he later had to recant. He declared, for instance, that, “for the most part, the bodies seemed to be intact. We found wallets and jewelry intact.”

In fact, what Wetli said was not true of almost any of the TWA victims recovered the first day, and more than half the 230 had not been found at all.

At best, of course, the situation was all but impossible. Police sealed off the building, and the Salvation Army arrived to feed and comfort those engaged in the terrible work. Nonetheless, what Wetli and his staff faced was, in the words of one eyewitness, “totally shocking and possibly emotionally damaging.”

And the amount of technical work to be done was staggering. Among other things, as each body bag was opened, the contents had to be inventoried and the body photographed, fingerprinted, measured, weighed and X-rayed for signs of shrapnel or any metal shards that could point to an explosive device. A dental examination, with separate X-rays, had to be performed and blood drawn for the toxicologist. External wounds had to be cataloged. Then a full autopsy.

At nightfall, only a handful of examinations had been completed and no identifications made.

*

At the State Department, officials began to “pulse the system”--reviewing existing intelligence reports and prodding intelligence officers overseas to press their sources harder for information.

They also began the exasperating task of evaluating reports of purported terrorist organizations claiming credit for the tragedy. Several such claims were quickly put forward from Middle Eastern groups, but authorities concluded none was credible.

*

The Rude, a 90-foot hydrographic vessel operated by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, carries an array of sonar and other technical equipment that enables it to map the floor of the ocean and objects on it the way a surveyor might diagram an Orange County subdivision.

On Wednesday, July 17, having finished such a chore in New York Harbor, the Rude (pronounced Rudy) had journeyed up the coast to Point Judith, R.I.--as it happened, passing directly over the spot where Flight 800 would plunge into the sea. That night, Cmdr. Sam De Bow of Brookville, Md., contacted the Coast Guard and doubled back.

De Bow was thinking primarily of the Rude’s underwater mapping capability, but its first task upon arriving Thursday morning was to help at the crash site. A private boat had come upon a 35-foot section of one of the 747’s wings, but was too small to handle it. The Rude tried to hoist the wing with the ship’s crane, a big black arm with a yellow hook. The wing was too heavy.

So De Bow towed the ungainly but possibly priceless catch to the Coast Guard cutter Juniper, which reeled it aboard.

*

By midmorning Thursday, FBI chief Kallstrom had his investigation well underway. He had linked up with Robert Francis, who was heading up the NTSB’s investigation. And Kallstrom’s agents were swarming over Long Island and New York in a process that resembled the Oklahoma City investigation.

They were talking to residents along the gilded Hamptons. They were interviewing boat owners and sailors. Descending on marinas, they dusted for bomb residue on any boats that had been chartered or rented the night before. They were combing the marshes for footprints. They were trolling the beaches for sand prints. They searched for discarded debris. By nightfall, they would be stopping motorists near the beach strand.

Even late into the night, young agents just out of the FBI academy would be walking up with clipboards and flashlights to talk to anyone who might have something to add.

Agents searched out airport baggage handlers and gate workers, security agents and airline mechanics. And, while a bomb did not necessarily have to be the work of foreign hands, as Oklahoma City reminded him, Kallstrom had reached out to federal law enforcement agents overseas. Order agents to Athens? “We’re already there, and we’re going to get what we need,” he told a questioner. “There is nothing that I cannot have at my disposal.”

Yet for all he was doing as a helicopter shuttled him between his New York headquarters and the scene on Long Island, Kallstrom was in an emotionally uncomfortable position: He was a cop without a crime.

His best evidence apparently lay on the bottom of the ocean. Until the wreckage could be pinpointed, until salvage crews could bring what he needed ashore and waiting technicians could work their magic in Washington--until then, Kallstrom was pursuing a case that, at least officially, did not exist.

“I want that wreckage,” he said more than once as the hours seemed to creep by. “I want my forensics. I want my evidence.”

He fretted that the longer the wreckage lay on the ocean floor, the more likely that telltale signs could disappear. He worried that metal fragments were rusting. He was chafed by the thought that fluctuating currents could scour away burn patterns. He worried that the human remains were decomposing.

And, surveying the vastness of the sea, he was haunted by the memory that the key to the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 had been a tiny piece of bomb material no larger than a man’s fingernail.

The Lockerbie evidence, Kallstrom kept thinking, was found on land. In the case of TWA Flight 800, any such fragment was somewhere beneath 100 feet of seawater.

As Friday began, wind and squalls moved in, but the Rude made a start at the work it was built for. Back and forth over the churning search area it passed like a lawn mower following an invisible pattern.

“Up and back,

To and fro

Oh, this liquid

Lawn we mow.”

Technician Charles Neeley sometimes recited the ship’s private rhyme as he gazed at a computer display of the swath of ocean bottom far below.

The work was monotonous, but the task was not. As a reminder, Skipper De Bow had taped a picture of a smiling Larkyn Lynn Dwyer, an 11-year-old child lost on Flight 800, to the blue metal housing of the navigational equipment that allows the Rude to fix its position within a few feet on a featureless ocean.

De Bow has a daughter Larkyn’s age.

The ship operated three sonar systems, including one nicknamed “the fish.” Housed in a torpedo-shaped tube topped by what looked like wings, this unit was towed beneath the surface. It projected sound waves to the side and downward, converting the echoes into images on a computer screen.

Ironically, although its capabilities would prove critical in the TWA investigation, the Rude was operating under a cloud: Congressional budget-cutters have targeted such nautical operations for major cutbacks.

But on Friday, the more immediate problem was weather. Rising seas and winds approaching gale force led to suspension of virtually all rescue operations by early afternoon.

The Rude, its fuel and supplies running low and its crew exhausted, headed for Newport, R.I., about seven hours away.

It would not be back on station until Sunday.

*

Storm warnings also were up at the Weinberg Forensic Center. The medical examiner accepted the services of three pathologists from the New York City medical examiner’s office, as well as FBI fingerprint experts and 25 volunteer dentists from the area. And he sent an aide to brief the increasingly impatient families and ask for their help in obtaining dental records, X-rays, medical files and other data.

And the embattled medical examiner tried to mollify his critics, saying: “It’s a process which, by its nature, is going to take time. For the family members, it’s a very trying time and it’s taking forever.”

Further, addressing the incessant demand from reporters for information about possible sabotage, Wetli announced that “the autopsies did not reveal anything about the nature of the explosion.” Most of those examined had died from collisions with objects as the plane blew apart and fell.

He also told of a poignant story. One of the two positive identifications made by early afternoon resulted from a stunning coincidence. As a volunteer dentist began to examine a body, he discovered that the person was a friend. “Oh, I know that person,” he said.

That evening, Wetli announced progress on another front. The first family had been informed of the identification of a loved one: Courtney Johns, 18, of Clarksville, Mich., on her way to France as an exchange student.

But progress came too late. Pataki expressed outrage when he learned that Wetli’s office was working only 12-hour shifts, rather than round the clock. Wetli surrendered, agreeing to accept more help.

“There is no better teacher than experience. . . . We did a lot of things right and some things wrong,” he said later.

*

In Washington, military analysts joined the hunt for clues, focusing especially on the possibility that a missile hit the plane; experts considered that unlikely, but some eyewitnesses had described a faint arc of light near the craft about the time it exploded.

Images taken at the time by infrared cameras on the Air Force Space Command’s satellites were examined. Navy intelligence analysts in Dahlgren, Va., used computers to enhance image-data taken from radar aboard the Aegis cruiser Normandy, which was at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay at the time.

Both were slim reeds. The satellite system was designed to pick up the firing of huge ballistic missiles, not the brief flash of a shoulder-fired missile. And Navy authorities said the Normandy’s radar, set at low power and 180 miles south of the crash site, probably could not have detected such a blast.

*

A team of FAA officials arrived in Athens from Washington and began work Friday morning, but an embassy official insisted the visit was part of the normal round of security checks at Hellenikon Airport. The FAA team planned to be there only for the weekend, an official said.

The Greek government expressed outrage that its airport might be suspected. Said a Greek security official of the FAA inspectors: “Yes, they are here, but it is nothing new. They started a new program a couple of months ago. It has nothing to do with the accident. The FAA is not a police agency. It is concerned with technical matters.”

*

With the bad weather holding, Kallstrom made the first of several visits to the Ramada Plaza Hotel to meet with family members. As much as he was heart and soul a cop, he understood that this case had an ambassadorial dimension.

What information he had did not interest the families, however. “They didn’t want to know how the investigation was going, or where,” he said later. “They wanted to know when their loved ones were coming out.”

*

John Juston, Salvation Army director for Suffolk, brought Sunday morning breakfast to workers at the Weinberg Center. As he entered, Juston was moved to tears by the unexpected sight of almost 100 people--doctors and technicians in their blue, pink and yellow scrubs, uniformed police officers, buttoned-down FBI agents and TWA employees--joining in a prayer led by Salvation Army Maj. Patricia Beeham.

“The thing that was impressive to me was the rapt attention,” Juston said. “I’m sure the building was made up of people of all denominations, but they were united there in their belief that God--their God--will help them through these difficulties.”

Today, things would start to get better in almost every way.

To begin with, the Rude was back mowing its watery lawn. And about 1 p.m. EDT, it hit a jackpot: sonar images of a “major debris field.”

“There it is. Look at this. We’ve got something now,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officer Nathan Hill of Rabun Gap, Ga., exclaimed as the computer screen first detected the wreckage.

Hill had concentrated on the technical challenge of the search to avoid being “overwhelmed by the destruction and the unimaginable terror the people must have felt,” he said later. He had slept five hours during the first 48 hours on the scene.

Soon, divers could descend right on top of some of the largest pieces of the plane. They quickly recovered six bodies. And the presence of large sections of the fuselage held the promise of many more victims and perhaps the first hard evidence of Flight 800’s fate.

With the discovery, said Kallstrom, “We think we’ll know the answer sooner rather than later.”

More optimism came with the arrival of the Navy vessel Grasp, a 255-foot workhorse equipped for salvage, diving and a host of other tasks. Its top speed was a mere 15 knots and it had taken almost 24 hours to chug north from its base at Little Creek, Md.

But it gave searchers a secure base from which to begin the heavy lifting. Equally important, it had a decompression chamber that would permit divers to stay submerged for 90 minutes at a time.

*

FBI technicians in Washington were among those frantic for this work to begin.

Field tests on some debris recovered earlier had indicated the possibility of explosives residue--a finding that triggered a blitz of excited media reports, but that fell apart when technicians in the “scientific analysis section” of the huge lab looked more closely.

The lab, actually a series of adjoining office-sized rooms, occupies almost the entire fifth floor of the Hoover building. Benches are crowded with microscopes, computers and a battery of “mass spectrometers,” each larger than a commercial washing machine. The latter are capable of detecting even the most exotic chemical compounds through their unique fingerprints on the light spectrum.

“A lot can be done by the trained eye,” said a former FBI official--to determine not only whether a blast had occurred but how powerful it was.

*

Kallstrom, the shotgun phase of evidence collection behind him, now was trying to winnow wheat from chaff. Investigators had isolated 75 to 100 eyewitness accounts that provided significant information. “I’d say they were all credible,” he said. “The trick now is, are these events related?

“Law enforcement hopes we walk away from here,” he added. “We hope it is not terrorism.” In his cop’s heart, he was not banking on hope.

*

At Smith Point Park, an elbow of land jutting out into the Atlantic near the crash site, nearly 1,000 relatives of passengers were transported to the beach for a memorial service. Some walked slowly to the water’s edge, holding one another. “There were too many stories of people on that plane who had things to offer to the world,” said Humphrey Sullivan, who lives near the airport, suggesting why the loss of TWA Flight 800 had made an unusually deep mark on others.

Finally, there was significant progress at the Weinberg Center. With three more victims recovered, the total reached 108, with 72 positive identifications and 70 families notified.

But the horror of the work was taking its toll on the staff, expanded though it was. At twilight, a forensic analyst paused to describe her experience. “It’s tough in there,” she said, her voice choking. “We’re accustomed to dealing with violent deaths, but this is different. It’s overwhelming. And it’s hard on everybody.”

Determined to move their criminal investigation forward even though identification of victims officially remained the top priority, FBI agents worked quietly in the midst of Wetli’s operation.

By Wednesday night, one official revealed, they had identified “silver blue metal shards” in some of the bodies, as well as signs of pitting in bits of wreckage. Neither finding was conclusive evidence of a bomb, but taken together, they reinforced the suspicions that investigators had held from the beginning.

*

Shortly before midnight, nine miles off the Long Island shore and 150 feet down, almost exactly a week after the crash, two Navy divers brought the long, frustrating investigation to a critical turning point.

Lowered from the Grasp’s metal dive platform, Chief Petty Officer Kevin J. Oelhasen of Appleton, Wis., found himself staring directly at the plane’s long-sought recorders. Almost simultaneously, his partner, Petty Officer Douglas Irish of Webster, Tex., also saw the containers’ pale neon-orange glow in the murky water.

To confirm what they had found, the divers directed a light from the Navy’s remotely operated underwater vehicle onto the objects. Within 45 minutes, the boxes were on the surface.

The NTSB’s Francis was at the Sheraton Smithtown Hotel, as he was almost every night, having a late dinner with aides and friends when his beeper went off. Francis excused himself and the gathering began to break up.

Suddenly Francis reappeared, racing across the lobby toward a covey of waiting police cars.

Had the black boxes been found? “Yes,” he answered, grinning broadly. How? “ROV”--the Navy’s remotely operated vehicle--he said before ducking into one of the police cars and roaring away.

The flight recorders, one designed to capture cockpit conversations and the other the plane’s mechanical performance, were flown to Washington during the wee hours and delivered to a windowless 20-by-30-foot laboratory at the NTSB’s headquarters. Carefully, technicians opened the metal-sheathed containers.

With representatives of the FAA, TWA, the plane’s manufacturer, the pilots union and the FBI, they used computer and audio equipment to pull out the data and translate it into an understandable format. Information from the flight recorder was plotted in graph form, very much like a medical electrocardiogram. The voice recorder yielded both tapes and a printout.

By midafternoon, however, a grim reality became clear: The end of Flight 800 came so suddenly that there was nothing to spell out what had happened. Only an abrupt sliver of noise, then the silence of empty tape.

A “major internal explosion” had taken out everything, experts concluded. But even “nothing” might be something. When experts recovered the black boxes from Pan Am 103 and a 1985 Air India flight, both bombed from the sky, those tapes also ended with silence.

On Friday, NTSB investigators completed a remarkable technical feat. Breaking down information from air-traffic radar facilities tracking the TWA plane and everything else in the sky, and laying it alongside the information from the recorders before they stopped, experts brought forth a surprisingly clear picture of Flight 800’s final minutes.

Two separate systems track commercial flights: Traditional radars show each plane’s direction and position, and an “enhanced” system gathers flight data from a transponder aboard each plane.

Each burst of data from a transponder is called a hit. The last three from Flight 800 showed it climbing normally at about 400 mph. Then the transponder stopped--at almost precisely the moment the plane’s cockpit-voice recorder and flight-data recorder went dead.

For another 36 seconds, traditional radar continued to show the plane traveling through the air but losing altitude rapidly, experts presumed.

An instant later, a fireball was spotted by pilots of nine other planes in the area.

A full tank of jet fuel would not burn until it mixed with air, one investigator explained. If a smaller explosion had knocked out the 747’s electrical system and torn through the tanks, it may have taken another half-minute for the fuel to absorb enough air to detonate in a final, cataclysmic blast.

*

At the search site, it was a weekend of cautious diving, recovering more bodies and preparing for the crucial task of hoisting up the wreckage. A second Navy salvage ship, the Grapple, was brought up from Norfolk, Va. The Pirouette was repositioned to enlarge the search area. The dive team was increased to 100.

It was technical, time-consuming work, but it would pay off. Two engines were located. Additional bodies were found. And adding the Grapple gave searchers significantly greater capacity to move forward on retrieving the wreckage that experts were relying on to tell them what happened.

What lay beyond the obtaining of that fateful piece of knowledge, none dared say.

DAY 1

No frantic radio message, no emergency alarm . . . it was just not there.

DAY 2

‘I want that wreckage. I want my forensics. I want my evidence.’

DAYS 3-5

‘They wanted to know when their loved ones were coming out.’

DAY 6

Searchers sort through the wreckage from a ‘major debris field.’

DAY 7

‘We’re accustomed to . . . violent deaths, but this is different.’

DAY 8

Navy divers discover the black boxes, a turning point in the probe.

DAY 9

The end was so sudden that nothing spelled out what had happened.

DAYS 10-12

Picture of the final minutes becomes surprisingly clear.

This story was reported by Times staff writers Richard T. Cooper, James Gerstenzang, John J. Goldman, Josh Greenberg, Marc Lacey, Eric Malnic, Gebe Martinez, Lisa Meyer, Alan C. Miller, Art Pine, Richard A. Serrano, Mary Williams Walsh and Robin Wright; it was written by Cooper.

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The Final Moments

Radar images are giving investigators some insight into the final moments of Flight 800. The first set of blips comes from the plane’s transponder, a device on the plane that sends a signal to controllers. The final set comes from standard radar. Since the transponder was destroyed in the explosion, it is between those points that the first blast occurred.

(please see newspaper for full map/chart)