A Mission Engulfed in a Vacuum of Uncertainty

NEW YORK —  Al Dickinson had just ordered pizza when the phone rang.

It was a friend who likes a practical joke. “Looks like we have a big crash up in New York,” he said.

This time, the friend, who works at the Federal Aviation Administration, sounded serious. Besides, it was dinner time, not 3 a.m., when he usually called. Worst of all, he said the plane was a jumbo jet, a Boeing 747.

Alfred W. Dickinson, 52, a top investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency charged with figuring out why airplanes crash, turned to his girlfriend. The pizza was far from his mind. “I’ll probably be back,” he said, “by maybe the end of the weekend.”

Seven months would pass before Al Dickinson returned to his condo in suburban Washington. Designated the investigator in charge of the formal inquiry into the crash of TWA Flight 800, he would help lead the most expensive, complex and difficult task of detection in U.S. aviation history.

Today is July 6, only 11 days short of one year since Flight 800 killed 230 people when it exploded into a searing flash as it crawled up and away from John F. Kennedy International Airport at 8:31 p.m. and into the gathering dusk, nine miles off Long Island. Dickinson and other investigators have spent nearly $30 million trying to figure out why it happened.

This also makes it nearly one year since Dickinson and his girlfriend decided on pizza. The investigation is still not over. “She doesn’t believe me anymore,” he said, especially about how long it will take. But that is not his biggest frustration. Were he asked to name some larger ones--and officially he cannot say--he probably would offer three.

* The combined forces of the NTSB and the FBI and an army of researchers at half a dozen government-funded laboratories do not know for sure why Flight 800 blew up. They think a spark ignited vapor in a mostly empty fuel tank. But they still cannot completely rule out a bomb or a missile, and they might never truly know what caused the plane to crash.

* Into this vacuum of uncertainty people have poured their own notions, including one theory about a huge bubble of natural gas that rose from the sea and swallowed the aircraft in a fiery gulp, and another about a Navy missileer who shot down the jet by mistake and is engaging his higher-ups in a government-wide conspiracy to keep it secret.

* The FAA, for its part, has refused the NTSB’s request to act quickly and require all U.S. airlines flying Boeing 747s to change their design and eliminate the possibility that yet another mostly empty fuel tank might blow up, killing still more people and sending airline passengers everywhere into paroxysms of doubt about their safety.

Probe Has Language, Stress All Its Own

Before dawn, Dickinson and others from the NTSB flew to New York City. Police met them with a motorcycle escort. This, Dickinson fantasized, could be a presidential motorcade.

Their escort took them to Long Island, to a Coast Guard station at a small town on the Atlantic Ocean called Moriches. At first, it seemed inconceivable that such instant destruction of an airplane could have been caused by anything but a bomb. The FBI was already there.

So were police divers. More were arriving, and so were National Guard officers, Long Island politicians, the governor of New York, officials from Boeing Co. and the airline unions and 35 state and federal agencies. More than 2,500 people were scrambling for space on a base where only five members of the Coast Guard had been stationed just two days before.

Boats were bringing in body parts, luggage and floating wreckage. Investigators were taking everything to an old Grumman Corp. hangar at a nearby town called Calverton. To Dickinson, the hangar looked like a movie set. FBI agents were taking care not to lose, contaminate or destroy evidence. They wore white suits: biohazard gear.

The Coast Guard station had an immaculate lawn, the pride of the contingent. Now workmen were paving it for helicopters. Agencies were parking trailers everywhere. Each had its own command center. In a top-floor conference room at the Coast Guard station, Dickinson convened experts from all interested parties into working groups. Air crash investigations usually have eight to 12 working groups. This one had 19.

Flight 800 had fallen into 120 feet of water. Sonar and underwater TV showed that it had broken completely apart. There were thousands of pieces. Grieving families had gathered at a hotel near Kennedy Airport, and they were telling reporters that finding the remains of their loved ones had to come before retrieving the wreckage.

Finding the bodies was hard, and identifying them was harder. For the first time, pathologists used DNA from personal effects--a stain on an undergarment, a toothbrush that a victim had left at home by mistake. For three weeks, searchers concentrated on human remains. Only then did Dickinson’s effort to gather up the wreckage begin in earnest.

Divers, scallop trawlers and an underwater rig with a remote-control TV camera and two arms with claws eventually brought up 95% of the Boeing 747. It was the largest salvage operation since Pearl Harbor. The possibility of terrorism generated alarm from the White House down, and pressure to get the job done was tremendous.

Now and then, it caused odd things to happen. Dickinson assigned a member of his staff, whose family was from India, to one of the salvage boats, with the understanding that he would stay aboard only one day.

The man finally returned five days later. He straggled into one of Dickinson’s nightly progress meetings and started his report. But he was so tired he spoke in Hindi. Others at the meeting were so exhausted it took them awhile to notice, and no one had the heart to interrupt.

Finally the man realized what he was doing. He stopped. Then he said, in English:

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

*

Piece by piece, investigators took TWA Flight 800 into the hangar at Calverton. It was the NTSB’s biggest reconstruction project. Its specialists reassembled 877 pieces into a ghost jet 94 feet long and 27 feet high. They formed the fuselage, the supporting wing structure and the center fuel tank. Wags called the 6,500-pound edifice Jetosaurus Rex.

As Dickinson and the others stood before their monster, they stewed about what could have blown a Boeing 747 into so many shreds. They tested everything from human causes to mechanical failures to wanton acts of nature--every cause that might be even remotely possible, from the utterly mundane to the wildly outrageous: bombs, missiles, ruptured fuel lines, sparks, a meteorite, space junk. Everything.

By now, fall and winter were bringing blow-back from hurricanes, and then long weeks of freezing wind and, finally, sleet. It raked across the sea like silver needles. The misery seemed like it would never end. Salvage boats turned back to the Long Island shore. At times, Dickinson’s investigators grew so seasick they could not stay aboard.

Finally, Dickinson himself ran out of adrenaline. He began to wake up at night soaked in sweat and worry. He ran a fever. It climbed.

Concerned, Dickinson, on a rare trip home to Washington, paid a visit to a doctor. The doctor suspected cancer.

He sent Dickinson for tests.

Negative.

Must be stress, the doctor said: a likely possibility.

Dickinson had not been home in what seemed like forever. The pressure was causing him to overeat. He was gaining weight. When he got back to Long Island, he joined a health club and started working out.

It helped.

In time, the long winter ended. Dickinson and his people were eliminating possibilities. They could find neither an entry hole nor any shrapnel from a missile. Nor could they find any evidence of a bomb. More than 100 eyewitnesses had seen streaks of light near the plane before it exploded, but investigators could find no signs of anything unusual in data from satellites or on radar tapes.

A report circulated that Flight 800 had developed a fuel leak. False alarm. Inside the center fuel tank, investigators found pieces of metal containing titanium, a component of missiles. But the tank maker said its bolts contained titanium. False alarm. The investigators saw splatter on top of the fuel tank. A lab at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said it contained nitrates, a component of explosives. But nitrates were used in nearby tubing, which took air to the passenger cabin. False alarm.

The investigators did notice, however, that the center fuel tank, under the fuselage in the middle of the plane, had blown outward. The eyewitnesses might have spotted flashes of fire from the tank before they heard it explode. There were empty seats and the flight to Paris was comparatively short, so this center tank had been almost empty. There was room inside for fumes and air to mix at just the right ratio to form a highly combustible vapor. Worse yet, air-conditioning equipment under the tank could have heated the vapor and primed it to explode.

But what could have ignited it? Maybe a spark from faulty wiring or from a scavenge pump. Dickinson and his investigators focused on a fuel line running through the center tank, connecting it to fuel tanks in the wings. O-rings between parts of the line could have grown old and become distorted. They might have caused a grounding break and allowed static electricity, created by moving fuel or by spray from a fuel leak, to discharge a spark into the warm fuel/air vapor.

Such electrical problems, the investigators thought, seemed to be the most likely cause of the crash. FBI Director Louis J. Freeh said on TV one Sunday that the cause was more likely mechanical than criminal. TWA, a target, along with Boeing, of litigation by the victims’ families, rebuked him for “unproven speculation.” Dickinson, however, thought that Freeh was right, and the NTSB said so publicly.

But neither the FBI nor the NTSB could prove that there actually had been a spark, because static electricity leaves no trace, and because the fuel tank explosion had damaged or destroyed everything near it.

Thus, the two federal agencies responsible for investigating the crash of Flight 800 could come to no firm conclusion about what had caused it.

*

Dickinson’s boss, Jim Hall, chairman of the NTSB, says more tests are planned. The tests, he says, will include “lots of scenarios” using mock-ups of the center fuel tank. The mock-ups, he says, will be used to try to duplicate the ignition and explosion. He says top federal research laboratories will participate. He hopes that the tests will end the “factual phase” of the investigation by fall.

Then he plans hearings. They are scheduled for Dec. 8 in Baltimore, the only place with an available arena large enough for the anticipated crowd. “For us,” Hall said, “the hearings will present an opportunity to put on the public record all the information that’s available.”

Hall thinks that the NTSB eventually will come up with the probable cause of the crash. He says he will keep the investigation open “until a probable cause is found.”

Others, however, doubt the investigation into Flight 800 will ever end. They think it will go down in history as a one-in-a-million freak accident.

To Dickinson, that is not satisfactory. But he takes refuge in dry wit.

“Could be worse,” he said. “It could have happened in Alaska in winter.”

“You got the case.”

New York Detectives Not Immune to Tragedy

John Liguori and Tom Corrigan should have ducked.

They were in the operations center at the New Yorkfield office of the FBI. Liguori, dark-haired and intense, is an FBI agent; Corrigan, graying and easier going, is a New York City detective. They do not duck.

John Liguori and Thomas F. Corrigan, both in their 30s, have been partners in the FBI/New York City Police Department Joint Terrorist Task Force for the past five years. They know about complicated investigations, and they have gotten to know each other so well that they finish each other’s sentences.

Liguori is organized, smart, has a good sense of people and never runs out of energy. Corrigan is smart too, as well as intuitive, tactful and a good listener. If this was a crime, the mystery of Flight 800 was theirs to solve. Their first thought was a bomb.

As principal investigators, they saw to it that everything obvious was being done: Airline mechanics, baggage handlers, refuelers, ticket agents, members of the previous flight crew--all had to be interviewed, and quickly. The flight had come from Greece, and the FBI had a liaison office in Athens, but it was small. More agents had to be sent. Flight controllers needed to be questioned. So did radar operators who tracked the plane. Liguori and Corrigan made their first decision: to question everyone.

As FBI agents and city police reported back each day with what they found, Liguori and Corrigan ranked the leads, along with tips that rolled in from intelligence agencies and the State Department. James K. Kallstrom, in charge of the New York field office and a deputy director of the FBI, told them they could have all the manpower they needed.

After five days, Corrigan flew out to Calverton, on Long Island, to see the hangar where personal effects and wreckage were being sorted.

It stopped him short. Everything was cold, wet. On the floor was a teddy bear.

Corrigan has kids. It crushed him.

*

Back at headquarters, everyone with an imagination had a theory: insurance fraud, mechanical failure, a meteor, a laser beam, a ball of lightning, the huge burp of natural gas, cabin pressure that burst the plane like a balloon. There was even a theory offered by an academic in Illinois: “Have you ever heard of triboelectrification?”

Liguori had not; neither had Corrigan; but if it was a crime, it was their problem. Every interview created paperwork: a 302 Form, in the language of the FBI. Liguori and Corrigan devised a way to handle all the forms but, even so, the paperwork threatened to bury them. Equally demanding of the bureau was the chain of evidence: the custody chain, as it is called. The FBI placed an agent at every link to provide continuity and protect evidence for presentation in court.

The moment a piece of wreckage was pulled dripping from the ocean, it was tagged with its latitude and longitude. An agent on the boat signed for it. Another agent signed for it on the transfer barge, another on the dock. An agent rode the truck that carried it to the hangar, where still another agent cataloged it. At one point, 600 agents worked the case.

As the weeks passed, ideas came to Liguori and Corrigan at odd times. Corrigan began talking to his own voice mail from his car phone so he would not forget what he was thinking.

Liguori rushed through the door at home, scrambled for a piece of paper and told his wife:

“I’ve got to write this down.”

Liguori and Corrigan reviewed every study of a plane blown apart by a bomb or struck down by a missile during the last 15 years. They noted how bombs were brought on board and where they were placed. Their agents met with special forces experts who knew about explosives, and with intelligence operatives from Britain, France and Israel.

A woman came to visit. Her husband had been one of 270 people killed aboard Pan Am Flight 103, blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 by a terrorist. The woman sat with Liguori and Corrigan for an afternoon and told them how their agents and their detectives could be more sensitive with grieving families and still ask penetrating questions.

One morning, Liguori and Corrigan went to see a Boeing 747 first-hand to familiarize themselves with how it was built. A TWA pilot walked them through it, and they studied it like medical students examining a patient.

Then they took a ride and sat in various seats. They imagined passengers, whose names they knew.

It bothered both of them.

*

What bothered them too was that Flight 800 was in danger of becoming another John F. Kennedy assassination. Conspiracy theorists were beginning to spin fantasies that both Liguori and Corrigan knew were false.

Most prominent among the TWA conspiracy theorists was none other than Kennedy’s former press secretary, Pierre Salinger, and a group of like-minded inquisitors who had obtained a videotape of the radar at Kennedy Airport. ABC News said Salinger’s group had offered to sell the tape for $1 million, but the network had declined. The tape, Salinger said, showed a missile streaking toward Flight 800 just before it blew up.

It was a Navy missile, Salinger said, and it was launched during a secret exercise off Long Island. He said it was supposed to have hit a target cruise missile, but that it fixed on Flight 800 by mistake. Thus, Salinger said, Flight 800 was shot down by friendly fire, and the government was conspiring to cover it up.

Liguori’s boss, James Kallstrom, and Kallstrom’s boss, Louis Freeh, the FBI director, were incensed. “I think that’s wrong,” Freeh declared. It is “total nonsense,” said Kallstrom. He called Salinger’s claim “ridiculous” and “outrageous” and an “absolute charade on the American public.” In one particularly angry response, Kallstrom suggested that people like Salinger ought to “get a life.”

Investigators were aware of the radar tape. Kallstrom said it showed an unarmed aircraft, a Navy P-3 Orion, passing 7,000 feet above Flight 800--with full knowledge of air traffic controllers, but without an operating transponder. “When your transponder is not on, it shows on the radar screen as a solid line, and if you look at that--I guess if you’re a schoolkid--you could say, ‘That looks like a missile--or a cigar, or a pencil.’ ”

To Salinger and other conspiracy theorists, such dismissals simply confirmed their claim that officials were covering up.

Moreover, the investigators had left the door open an inch or two for the possibility that the explosion of Flight 800 might be a crime. They thought a bomb in the main cabin was very unlikely. But a smaller, shaped charge could not be ruled out. Nor could a missile with a proximity fuse that exploded outside the aircraft.

*

A three-dimensional analysis of molecule patterns around holes in the fuselage and parts of the center fuel tank is still underway to see if a shaped charge or a missile can be eliminated. The investigators hope that the analysis can be completed this fall.

In addition, they still hope to fly another Boeing 747 soon, specifically to study its infrared signature, which a missile could use to home in on its target.

“I’d like the public to know we’re a dedicated group of professionals who put every effort into this investigation,” Kallstrom said, describing Liguori’s and Corrigan’s work, as well as the work of all their agents and detectives.

Still, experts in conspiracy theory doubt that the fantasies will ever go away. Barry Glassner, chairman of the sociology department at USC, says many people no longer support or believe institutions, including the government. He calls it “disinvestment.”

“TWA is really an excellent illustration of this,” he said. “We had just come through the ValuJet crash [on May 11, 1996, in the Everglades, which killed 110 people].” The reaction, he notes, was to say the government, which should protect the flying public, had failed. “So heads rolled at the FAA [Administrator David Hinson and his deputy resigned].

“There were big exposes in the press, all of which, from any rational calculus, were ill-founded. The safety record of airlines is extraordinary. The number of planes that fall out of the sky is tiny, almost to the point where you would get roughly the same number by chance. But we just had gone through a period where we had disinvested [government] in all those different ways. So when TWA goes down, we’d already had the heads roll. We were supposed to have cleaned the place up, and now they can’t explain [TWA]. Where are you going to turn, right?”

What to do? “You know that bumper sticker: ‘S--- Happens.’ That really is the bottom line on how a lot of things go on. We’d be much better off as a society if we came to terms with that and accepted it.”

Divers Encounter Carnage Up Close and Personal

None of which is comforting to investigators like Liguori and Corrigan. They want their work to be recognized for what it is: a painstaking effort to discover the truth.

Liguori said: “You take an investigation like this very personally.”

Corrigan added: “Everyone on this squad treats the passengers on the plane as if they were their own family.

“That’s the way we look at it: as if it had happened to one of our own.”

It costs $30 to take a panel truck towing a Boston whaler across the toll bridge and eventually onto the Long Island Expressway.

Thirty dollars. Scott Shire and his men could not believe it. Then came the insult of trying to drive on the expressway itself. When the traffic was not speeding, it was stalled.

Lt. Scott R. Shire, 32, commands a six-man team of Navy divers known as Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit Two, based near Sandy Hook, N.J. Only when he drew near the Coast Guard station in Moriches did a police escort appear, much like the one for Dickinson two days before. Where had these motorcycles been when Shire needed them?

Shire and his men floated the whaler and reviewed computerized sonar of the ocean floor. They could see shapes. There was only one way to know what they were. Dive. Shire and Chief Gunner’s Mate Dale L. Rock were the first Navy divers to search for TWA Flight 800. Because it was so deep, they could spend only 15 minutes on the bottom. The ocean floor was strewn with mangled pieces of the plane.

Metal. Plastic. Then they saw a larger chunk. It no longer had the appearance of an aircraft. It looked like a pile of junk. “How am I going to explain this?” Shire thought. “Is this the wing? Is this the fuselage? Get it all. You have to come up and explain to everybody. All the other divers are up there. They’re asking to come down if this is a good spot.” It was very good.

But nothing can prepare a diver for what Shire saw next. He gazed straight ahead at a mountain of wreckage.

People were tangled inside.

He blurted an exclamation into his air piece. The words formed bubbles. They drifted away in the water.

Nobody but God could hear what he had said.

*

Some days, fog was so thick that Shire and his men struggled to find their way to safe harbor. Other days, the sea was so rough it jarred their muscles and stiffened their backs. Electrical wires twisted through the wreckage and threatened to trap them. Jagged pieces of plane cut their wetsuits.

Worst were the bodies. Male or female? Nobody looked. It had been a human life. Get it to the surface. Give it to the boat. Shire always knew how deep he was and how much time he had left. More than 120 feet deep meant only 10 minutes, not 15. He and his men dove two at a time. Each man was there to save his partner.

NTSB Calls for Urgent Changes; FAA Delays Action

One day something happened that Shire will never forget. Two of his divers, Boatswain’s Mates Gregory Johnson and John Cornell, were swimming together along the sandy bottom when they came upon a stunning sight.

There, 120 feet below the surface, was a flag. It was a huge American flag. Someone on the plane must have been taking it to Europe.

Maybe it was to trade with a friend, or maybe to show appreciation.

It floated there, unfurled, waving in the current.

In the end, Shire and his divers knew it was up to others to solve the mystery of Flight 800 and apply its lessons for the sake of safety.

Last Dec. 13, the NTSB asked the FAA to order urgent changes on hundreds of jets, including all Boeing 747s, intended to keep heated fuel-air vapor from exploding in their center fuel tanks.

The changes would add insulation around heat-generating equipment, install sensors to warn flight crews when fuel tank temperatures climb, require crews to keep their fuel tanks full enough to prevent vapor buildup and direct them to fill their tanks before takeoff with cool fuel until machinery was installed to pump an inert gas into the tanks as the fuel emptied out.

The FAA did nothing until Feb. 18, when it responded that such changes would cost the airlines money. Then, in April, instead of ordering the changes, the FAA offered the airlines three months to comment--whereupon the airlines said these changes would increase their costs unnecessarily, at least until the NTSB ruled on why Flight 800 exploded. Nine days ago, the FAA wrote to Jim Hall, the NTSB chairman, saying more testing and research were needed.

Meanwhile, Boeing said it would ask all airlines that fly 747s to inspect their center fuel tanks for anything that might cause sparks. The manufacturer said it would recommend inspections of pumps, gauges and equipment that carries away static electricity. It noted that the NTSB had asked for design changes, but added: “Our experience indicates that the protective features built into the fuel system are effective.”

Jim Hall, the NTSB chairman, says “the lack of timeliness in the [FAA’s] response” has disappointed him more than anything. “That is not acceptable,” he says. “We are dealing with the confidence of the American people in the government process.

“We don’t issue urgent recommendations unless we consider it an urgent issue.”

Scott Shire knows far less about air safety than about diving. But he sounds like he is making Hall’s point when he says: “Every diver who dove was busting his behind to find an answer.

Everybody, he says, “was trying to make a difference.”

Times staff writers Eleanor Randolph in New York, Ralph Vartabedian in Washington and Richard E. Meyer in Los Angeles, as well as researchers Paul Singleton, Steve Tice, Maloy Moore and William Holmes in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

NEXT: A Year of Grief.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Anatomy of the Blast

Crash investigators have pieced together events of the first crucial seconds of the Flight 800 explosion:

1. Explosion occurs in center of tank.

2. The blast separates spanwise beam 3 from the ceiling of the tank. The beam lurches forward, hitting the front wall of the tank.

3. The tank’s front wall is propelled forward, detaching itself from the keel beam and crashing into the forward cargo hold. Without the front wall’s support, the structure of the front fuselage breaks down: the plane’s skin peels away.

4. Lacking the support of the front and middle beams of the fuel tank, the keel beam breaks in several places.

5. Without the keel and other beams to help support them, evidence indicates the left wing breaks away from fuselage.

Access doors in the beams are used by workers to move between tank compartments.

Keel beam: Beams of center tank are bolted to keel beam, a structural support that runs under the tank.

Source: Newsday, Times staff, National Transportation Safety Board