Crash Course

When National Transportation Safety Board contractors started reconstructing the wreckage of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 at the new NTSB Academy in Northern Virginia, Ellen Engleman-Conners decided not to watch. She waited until the work was done to cast her eyes on the Humpty-Dumpty patchwork that once was a Boeing 747. "I walked in and I said, 'Wow!' It was as simple as that," she recalls. The NTSB chairwoman was inspired. "I was somewhat in awe of the physical structure for its potential," she says. "I didn't feel sadness. I felt hope."

TWA 800 crashed in the Atlantic Ocean off the southern coast of Long Island, N.Y., on the night of July 17, 1996, shortly after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport. The 25-year-old passenger jet was bound for Paris with 230 people aboard. Everyone died when the plane's center wing fuel tank ruptured. Federal investigators concluded the most likely cause was a fire. They reported that a short-circuit in bundled wire leading to a fuel-quantity indicator sparked vapors inside the tank.

The plane disintegrated in less than a minute, leaving a four-mile-long trail of sunken debris. The sides and top just in front of the wings peeled away first. The nose cone fell off next. The tail section flew farthest. U.S. Navy ships and submarines brought up thousands of pieces from the sea floor off East Moriches, N.Y. The five-month recovery effort and subsequent investigation cost $55 million.

Today, a cylindrical scaffold with viewing platforms supports what is left of the 747's ripped and peeling metal skin. Every piece is tagged, numbered and marked with a date to document when and where it was found. Some pieces are as big as a car. Many can be held in the palm of a hand. The smaller ones are strung together with plastic tie wraps and rusty wire. Cardboard cutouts replace some that are missing. A gaping hole in the left side of the fuselage exposes a row of passenger seats. The wreckage smells of soot from flames that engulfed the right side.

The 93-foot-section of the airliner's crumpled fuselage is the main-currently the only-attraction inside a 72,000-square-foot hangar at NTSB's 10-month-old training facility on the Ashburn, Va., campus of The George Washington University. Eventually, the secure, reinforced concrete hangar will house other wrecks-cars, boats, and maybe even the space shuttle Columbia-as tools for teaching accident investigation techniques. Curiosity seekers be warned. "This is not a stop on the Washington, D.C., tour," says Engleman-Conners. "This is a living laboratory that is restricted to the NTSB invitees that are appropriate to learn from it."

The remains of TWA 800 landed at the academy partly because NTSB is so proud of its work on the case. A painstaking reconstruction of the debris in 1997 helped investigators disprove widespread theories that a missile strike was to blame. "We've learned a lot from that crash," says Engleman-Conners.

At the safety board's urging, the Federal Aviation Administration has developed a prototype system designed to eliminate flammable vapors in airplane fuel tanks. NTSB also recommended different fueling procedures to reduce the potential for explosions. Eight years after the crash, the board still hopes to persuade U.S. regulators to apply the lessons of TWA 800 to rules governing the maintenance of wiring and other systems in aging airliners.