Introduction
It was July 17, 1996 a TWS flight 800 was scheduled from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Leonardo da Vinci Airport Rome with a stop over at Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris. The aircraft was Boeing 747 carrying 230 people out of which 212 were passengers and 18 were crew members. There were no survivors in this crash.
Captain Ralph G. Kevorkian (58 years) and Captain Steven E. Snyder (57 years) and flight engineer Richard G. Campbell (63 years) were flying this aircraft. A highly experienced crew was taking the command of the aircraft.
It was a delayed flight as it was scheduled to depart at 7 pm but it departed at 8:02 pm that day. It was a pleasant flight everything was normal right after 12 minutes if takeoff the connection with the aircraft was lost. Approximately, 37 seconds later the captain of Eastwind Arlines reported to the ATC "Just saw an explosion out here, we just saw an explosion ahead of us here about 16,000 feet or something it just went into the water." The search of survivors started as police vessels and other rescue services started reaching the crash site.
Initial investigation was in the direction of terrorist attack or missile attack, but there was no proper conclusion of the crash cause. so, the agencies started collecting the debris from the sea with the help of scuba divers and the debris was transported to the hanger. Now the 95 % of the wreckage was recovered and the aircraft was reconstructed back in order to investigate the portions of the aircraft with more damage and less damage.
Along with this the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder revealed everything was normal but the captain was saying "Look at that crazy fuel flow indicator there on number four... see that?" The sound recorded after this was same as it was recorded from other aircraft in-flight breakups.
After, many experiments on the fuel tanks and jet fuel the conclusion was the explosion in the center wing fuel tank which resulted in the ignition of flammable fuel/air mixture in the tank. The source of first explosion was the short circuit in the electrical wiring of fuel quantity indication system.
On July 14, 2004 the TWA Flight 800 International Memorial was built and the Fund for this memorial was raised by the families of TWA Flight 800 Association.
