Christine Negroni - Deadly Departure: Why the Experts Failed to Prevent the TWA Flight 800 Disaster and How It Could Happen Again

For my father

DANIEL

Words and Music by Elton John and Bernie Taupin
Copyright 1972 Universal-Dick James Music, LTD
a division of Universal Studios, Inc. (ASCAP)
International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved

DEADLY DEPARTURE. Copyright 2000 by Christine Negroni. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

ISBN 0-06-019477-4 (hc.)

ISBN 0-06-93265-1 (pbk.)

EPub Edition September 2013 ISBN 9780062322975

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D espite the horror, anger, frustration, and grief that followed the crash of Flight 800, hundreds of participants agreed to tell their personal stories. Without them Deadly Departure could not have been written.

Thanks to the Cremades Vila family, the Gray brothers, the Houck family, the Krick family, Ted Lang, Maria Lucien, and the Snyder brothers.

I owe the following people for the time and energy they generously shared:

Bill Adair, First Officer Vincent Cocca, Mark DiPalmo, Tom Ellis, Peter Goelz, Bob Golden, Kitty Higgins, Jim Kallstrom, Elaine Kamarck, Mike Kelly, Bob Knapp, Lee Kreindler, Lieutenant Thomas Martorano, George Marlin, Don Nolan, Captain Jerry Rekart, Pat Robinson, Captain John Rohlfing, Ron Schleede, Dr. Dennis Shanahan, Captain Robert Sumwalt, Dr. Charles Wetli, and Arthur Wolk.

In addition, technical advice and historical background were shared with infinite patience by Captain Fred Arenas, Captain Eugene Banning, Merritt Birky, Ed Block, John Borger, Benito Botteri, Ray Boushie, William Brookley, Robert Clodfelter, Major General Richard Goetze, Richard Hill, Thomas Horeff, Michael Huhn, Cleve Kimmel, Craig Mullen, Jimmie Oxley, Ned Preston, Michael ORourke, Captain Hugh Schoelzel, Carl Vogt, Jim Wildey, Captain Jim Walters.

I am grateful to the following press representatives: Doug Webb, Gary Lesser and Russ Young at Boeing, David Venz and Mary Anne Greczyn at Airbus, Eliot Brenner and Kathryn Creedy at the Federal Aviation Administration, John Mazor at the Air Line Pilots Association, Mark Hess at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Jim Finkle at the Air National Guard 106th Air Rescue Wing, Ted Lopatkiewicz and Paul Schlamm at the National Transportation Safety Board. Thanks also to Sue Baker and Helen Cavanaugh at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Special thanks go to my agent, Freya Manston, for believing in my work, and to my publisher, Diane Reverand, and Matthew Guma at Cliff Street Books.

I was challenged and encouraged by CNN producers Nancy Peckenham, Barclay Palmer, Ron Dunsky, and Shannon Troetel, and well served by the CNN crews who worked with me, made me laugh, and even fed me.

My sister Lee read every word of this book and cut out half of them. Shes the best editor a sister can have. My children, Marian, Antonio, Sam, and Joseph, did without me for months on end without complaint and indulged me with their support and encouragement.

Everlasting love to my husband, Jim Schembari, who knows whats good, right, and important, and by his example teaches me to strive for all three.

W e will never know what the last moments were like for the people who died on Flight 800. I have described those scenes by piecing together evidence from a number of sources, including transcripts from the cockpit voice recorder and conversations between the pilots and air traffic controllers; examination of cockpit instruments and the flight data recorder also provided important details.

From 8:31 P.M., the time the plane exploded without warning, there is less verifiable information about events. With the help of numerous experts I have written what is likely to have happened.

I spoke with fellow pilots and supervisors who worked with the crew. They were able to offer insight into their personalities, motivations, skills, and philosophy of piloting.

Pilots who lived through harrowing flights analyzed their experiences to construct a scenario of the last actions of Captains Steven Snyder and Ralph Kevorkian, and flight engineers Richard Campbell and Oliver Krick. Professional flight attendants drew detailed scenes of the atmosphere in the passenger cabin at the beginning of a transatlantic flight. They are well suited to do this because so much of their job requires observation of passenger behavior.

Aerodynamicists, who study the physics of flight; air crash investigators, who find answers in a confusing jumble of wreckage; and physicians in aerospace medicine, who study the effects of force on the human body, talked with me about what happened aboard TWA Flight 800 from the moment it exploded at 13,700 feet. Family and friends of those who died were eager to talk about the character of their loved ones and even, with some difficulty and pain, willing to consider how they may have faced death.

I became involved in the crash on July 17, 1996, the night it happened. Just before midnight, my husband shook me awake. He had heard on the news that a TWA 747 had crashed shortly after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. He was bracing me for the call that was certain to come from CNN, where I worked as a correspondent. He was also bracing himself against his own fear of flying, which was brought very close to home with this particular crash. Days earlier, wed buckled ourselves and our children into a TWA 747, returning from vacation in Europe. Snug in our seats, we were trustful but a little nervous. I am certain that many of the people who boarded TWA Flight 800 later that same month felt the same contradictory emotions: nervous about the improbability of such an enormous airplane safely flying anywhere, yet confident that those in control, the airline, the planes manufacturer, the federal government, all knew what they were doing.

Before dawn the following day, I was in Long Island reporting the story for CNN. It was an assignment that would last more than a year.

Though the common perception of the Flight 800 disaster is that its cause will always remain a mystery, investigators discovered that the crash would not have occurred were it not for a fuel system design that has troubled aviation safety experts for years. Proposals to address the problem had been made, discussed, and dismissed for nearly four decades.

TWA Flight 800 was not the first airplane to be brought down by an in-flight fuel tank explosion. It was just the most widely publicized, the most dramatic, the most controversial. It was also the most deadly. That explains why until July 17, 1996, regulators and industry considered flying jetliners with flammable fuel tanks an acceptable risk, not worthy of a fix. The loss of 230 people convinced them otherwise.

T he comments that appear in quotation marks in Deadly Departure come from taped interviews I conducted with hundreds of individuals who were associated with TWA Flight 800, its crash and aftermath. Quotation marks also appear around transcripts of recorded cockpit conversations and communications between pilots, air control towers, and air controllers, as well as statements made to investigators, in public testimony, or legal depositions and statements made to news organizations and reporters. Where no verbatim record of private conversations exists, quotes were reconstructed from the recollections of the participants and substantiated. These reconstructed conversations will appear without quotation marks.