Twa Flight 800

Navy Fireman Jason C. Ferguson and his shipmates have been awarded the Navy Unit Commendation for supporting the search and recovery efforts of TWA Flight 800 while assigned to the USS Oak Hill.The Oak Hill is a dock landing ship that was called on to assist the National Transportation Safety Board to recover crash victims and wreckage of the plane.The award commends the ship and its crew for flawless and safe work in a professional manner.A 1994 graduate of Westminster High School, Ferguson joined the Navy in July 1995.

Arthur Francis "Frank" Carven III, an attorney who co-founded an advocacy group after his sister and her 9-year-old son were killed in the 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800, died of pancreatic cancer Thursday at his Forest Hill home. He was 54. Mr. Carven, formerly the Harford County government's top lawyer, sat on the Maryland Workers' Compensation Commission at his death. Born in Boston and raised in Dearborn, Mich. and Wilmington, Del., he earned a bachelor of arts in history at the University of Delaware and his law degree in 1978 from the University of Baltimore, where he was a member of the Heuisler Honor Society.

During the hours before TWA Flight 800 left on its final journey, a courier from a local eye bank delivered a box to the TWA Express commuter-airline counter in Baltimore, marked to show that it held emergency medical supplies.A short time later, a TWA employee at Kennedy International Airport delivered the box to Flight 800. It was carefully stowed in the cockpit, and federal investigators say they do not believe the box was ever opened for inspection.While investigators say they have no evidence that there was anything wrong with the shipment, they say its very presence aboard the aircraft represents a gaping hole in airline security.

WASHINGTON - An aviation safety breakthrough by government scientists has led to affordable technology that could virtually eliminate catastrophic fuel tank explosions like the one that destroyed TWA Flight 800, Federal Aviation Administration officials said yesterday. FAA Administrator Marion C. Blakey said the agency planned to require the airline industry to install new equipment on about 3,800 Boeing and Airbus passenger jets, which constitute the bulk of the commercial fleet. The process of issuing a regulation and phasing in the fixes could take nearly 10 years to complete at a cost of $140,000 to $220,000 per plane.

WESTHAMPTON BEACH, NEW YORK -- For the third time in less than a year, this quiet resort town of 1,700 has been hit by a calamity.Last August, a brush fire -- one of the largest in New York history -- threatened to consume the town, in May there was an ugly racial incident in which a young black man was savagely beaten and now there is TWA Flight 800, the kind of disaster that town folk always thought would happen somewhere else.Westhampton Beach is about 100 miles from New York City and for some here, it might as well be 10,000 miles.

NEW YORK -- After painstaking sweeps with sophisticated sonar and metal detectors and more than 3,200 forays by scuba divers, investigators of the crash of TWA Flight 800 thought they had found all that they were going to find of the shattered jumbo jet.But in just 2 1/2 days this week, crude scallop dredges raking the sandy crash site uncovered hundreds of pounds of buried wreckage, large and small, any piece of which could provide the critical clue to...

DUBLIN, N.H. -- Nansi Carroll sits in the creamy light of the empty concert hall at the Walden School, struggling to explain her lost friend, David Hogan.She knew him nearly 30 years, going back to the days when they were voice students together at the Peabody Conservatory. Still, the words don't come easily."He didn't speak about himself a lot," she says. "He would share his music. That was our way of knowing what he was thinking."The idea is hard to make concrete, she admits. But, then, there is something else on her mind: this evening's choral concert.

To investigators struggling to reconstruct what happened to TWA Flight 800, nothing is more critical than retrieving the two shoe box-size containers that cradle the flight data and cockpit voice recorders. In airline disasters, the "black boxes" are often the only expert witnesses that survive."They tell us a great deal about what the crew was up against," says Bill Hardman, marketing manager for Lockheed Martin Advanced Recorders in Sarasota, Fla., one of the leading manufacturers of "black boxes."

NEW YORK -- In the uncertain hours after the crash of TWA Flight 800, reporters at the scene quickly learned the cast of characters.At the Airport Ramada Plaza Hotel, where family members of victims assembled, the parking lot teemed with social workers, psychologists and clergy. At East Moriches, launching point for the crash investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board held court.And everywhere reporters went, they found the mayor of New York City.Rudolph W. Giuliani met for hours with grieving relatives of the passengers.

WASHINGTON -- Federal aviation investigators called yesterday for precautionary repairs to fuel-gauge electrical systems in thousands of Boeing jetliners to prevent the kind of explosion suspected in TWA Flight 800.Electrical wiring from fuel-measuring devices that extend into fuel tanks should be rerouted or shielded "to the maximum extent possible" to guard against the kind of power surge suspected in the blast of the Boeing 747 in 1996, the National Transportation...

WASHINGTON -- Federal aviation investigators called yesterday for precautionary repairs to fuel-gauge electrical systems in thousands of Boeing jetliners to prevent the kind of explosion suspected in TWA Flight 800.Electrical wiring from fuel-measuring devices that extend into fuel tanks should be rerouted or shielded "to the maximum extent possible" to guard against the kind of power surge suspected in the blast of the Boeing 747 in 1996, the National Transportation...

Investigators said yesterday they are still focusing on the possibility that a frayed wire -- possibly in TWA Flight 800's fuel measuring system -- might have short-circuited, touching off an explosion in the jumbo jet's overheated fuel tank.Testimony during the third day of the National Transportation Safety Board's hearings in Baltimore focused on what event -- or series of events -- might have caused the deadly blast that brought down the Paris-bound Boeing 747 off Long Island, N.Y., shortly after takeoff on July 17, 1996.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER TWA Flight 800 exploded off Long Island en route to Paris in July 1996, there were suggestions that terrorism, an initial suspect, might ultimately prove a less disturbing cause than something involving the engineering of the aircraft itself.That statement rings a little more true now that investigators have homed in on a possible flaw in fuel tank design. The findings were revealed in hearings being conducted by the National Transportation Safety Board this week in Baltimore.

As a historic National Transportation Safety Board hearing got under way here yesterday, expert witnesses and safety investigators sought to put to rest continued speculation that a bomb or missile brought down TWA Flight 800 off Long Island, New York.Even though a missile could have reached the Boeing 747 as it climbed to 15,000 feet, the reconstructed aircraft showed virtually no signs of high-velocity impact caused by a missile warhead, witnesses testified. Likewise, none of the 230 bodies had injuries typical of a bomb explosion, they said.

The National Transportation Safety Board's largest public hearing ever opens tomorrow in Baltimore, promising a detailed look into what may have caused Paris-bound TWA Flight 800 to explode off Long Island in July 1996, killing all 230 aboard.After scrutinizing more than 1 million pieces of wreckage, conducting 7,000 interviews and spending nearly $50 million, federal investigators believe that something -- faulty wiring, static electricity -- ignited vapors in the nearly empty center fuel tank.

BY NOW, you've heard that sabotage did not bring down TWA Flight 800.The FBI's basis for that conclusion included a detailed computer simulation that illuminated as never before what happened that July night in 1996. Now it's time to recall the urgent recommendations for safety changes put forth by the crash investigators almost a year ago, and the slow response by the Federal Aviation Administration.The National Transportation Safety Board developed a theory that an explosive air-fuel mix in the Boeing 747-131's largely empty central wing tank had ignited, though the cause of a precipitating spark is still unknown.

SMITHTOWN, N.Y. -- Federal law enforcement officials announced publicly yesterday that "microscopic explosive traces" have been found on part of the airplane wreckage of TWA Flight 800.But they cautioned that the small amount of residue, which is still being examined by forensic experts, is not yet enough to tell investigators how or why the jumbo jet carrying 230 people exploded last month."

WASHINGTON - An aviation safety breakthrough by government scientists has led to affordable technology that could virtually eliminate catastrophic fuel tank explosions like the one that destroyed TWA Flight 800, Federal Aviation Administration officials said yesterday. FAA Administrator Marion C. Blakey said the agency planned to require the airline industry to install new equipment on about 3,800 Boeing and Airbus passenger jets, which constitute the bulk of the commercial fleet. The process of issuing a regulation and phasing in the fixes could take nearly 10 years to complete at a cost of $140,000 to $220,000 per plane.

Deep inside the center fuel tank of the Boeing 747, beams more than 6 feet high divide the cavernous living-room-size structure into narrow compartments. An obscure access door with a hatchlike cover is used only rarely, when mechanics need to walk from one cell to another.This, investigators now know, is where the disintegration of TWA Flight 800 began. The access door blew off its beam. Another beam crashed forward. And a third beam was forced into the cargo hold. That, according to a 150-page draft report, was the beginning of the end.Like detectives in a crime novel, investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board have pieced together in astonishing detail the last moments of TWA Flight 800.Using microscopic metallurgical images, debris field diagrams that show the order in which the wreckage came off the plane, examinations of soot patterns and knowledge based on years of experience sifting through wreckage at crash sites, they have produced a document unprecedented in crash investigations.