Crews Said Close to Finding More Crash Victims

By ERIC MALNIC and ART PINE

July 24, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

EAST MORICHES, N.Y. —

Recovery crews stepped up their probe in a freshly discovered debris area on the ocean floor off Long Island on Tuesday, leading to new speculation that they may be on the verge of uncovering a sizable number of additional victims of TWA Flight 800.

After a day of searching the area using both underwater robots and human divers, officials said privately they were confident that recovery efforts being planned for today would retrieve more bodies.

New York Gov. George Pataki told reporters at a news conference that investigators hoped to find between 60 and 100 more victims at the underwater site, although federal officials said they had nothing to back up such speculation.

Robert T. Francis, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is overseeing the investigation, told reporters that initial probes had suggested that the debris area now being plumbed ought to yield “a pretty high percentage of aircraft wreckage.”

At the same time, investigators also said sonar searches have spotted another large piece of wreckage about 45 feet tall only a few hundred meters from the fuselage where the bodies have been located. However, they said, there is no indication what section of the plane it is.

The recovery effort accelerated Tuesday with the arrival of two ships: a Navy salvage vessel, the Grasp, which carries a special high-tech salvage robot, and a private cable-laying vessel that is equipped with a tractor that can crawl along the ocean floor.

3 Bodies Found

Yet despite the progress at the end of Tuesday’s workday, salvage crews had recovered only three more bodies and had not been able to haul in any significant new debris or sections of the aircraft’s fuselage, a portion of which is lying in the wreckage area.

By midafternoon, officials at the Suffolk County, N.Y., medical examiner’s office said they had made “positive identification” of 78 of the 108 victims whose bodies have been recovered and tentatively identified 10 more. In all, 230 persons died in the crash.

The coroner’s office announced the names of four additional crash victims from Southern California: Monique Chemtob of Los Angeles; Beverly Hammer of Long Beach; Melinda Torche of Mission Viejo, and Lani Warren of San Diego.

The action came as federal officials disclosed that tests of residue discovered on some fragments of the aircraft had shown no sign of explosives, despite earlier reports that preliminary screening had uncovered some traces.

At the same time, the Pentagon reported that an analysis of radar tapes and infrared images of the explosion, recorded by warships and spy satellites, had shown no immediate indication that the blast had been caused by a missile, as some analysts have theorized.

But James K. Kallstrom, the assistant FBI director who heads the agency’s New York office, said law enforcement officials still are looking seriously at the possibility that the explosion stemmed from a terrorist act, possibly a missile.

“We have circumstantial evidence that would point in those directions, but it certainly isn’t conclusive,” Kallstrom told the press conference that authorities held late on Tuesday. “I’m not discounting anything, quite frankly.”

While Tuesday’s recovery efforts yielded only slim results, officials said they believe they had made progress that could be significant. Recovery crews planned to work through the night, using underwater lights and video cameras.

Special Robots

Navy salvage teams were using special robots with sonar devices to search a second promising debris field several miles down the trajectory-path from the first.

Officials speculated that the heaviest pieces of debris--such as the landing gear and engines--were likely to have fallen the farthest distance along the path. “The hope is that if we follow this [trajectory], we will find most of the parts,” one official said.

Coast Guard officials said authorities had now completed an initial round of searches in an area 46 nautical miles wide by 65 nautical miles long--about the size of the state of Rhode Island--making 40 separate passes over the area.

The debris area that recovery crews now are concentrating on is a space of ocean about 3,000 meters long by 1,000 meters wide--about two miles by three-quarters of a mile--a much more manageable segment, according to transportation analysts.

The Navy announced Tuesday that it had dispatched a multipurpose amphibious ship, the Oak Hill, from the Norfolk, Va., naval base to serve as a command post for the operation. The vessel has a special well-deck that can accommodate large pieces of debris.

The Oak Hill will join a flotilla of more than 30 search vessels that took part in the recovery efforts Tuesday--including the Grasp, two civilian salvage ships, four Coast Guard cutters and 25 small boats. About 60 divers already are working, and another 60 are on the way.

Officials Piqued

Pataki’s assertion that authorities were expecting to find between 60 and 100 bodies in today’s search clearly embarrassed federal officials. “There are no bodies spotted that have not been recovered,” Francis said at the press conference, refusing any further comment.

At the same time, however, officials said privately they expected substantial progress today, when the two large Navy salvage vessels--one anchored at each end of the debris field--are to begin retrieving bodies and wreckage.

Crash investigators said they did not expect corrosion of the aircraft fragments--as a result of exposure to saltwater--to be a problem for at least several more weeks, so that the time pressures were not as intense as some outsiders have speculated.

Francis took pains during the press conference to address the inability thus far of sonar devices to detect the “pings” that are supposed to be transmitted automatically by the aircraft’s two “black boxes”--the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.

After the ValuJet crash in the Florida Everglades last month, “we never got any ping either,” yet divers eventually located both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder,” Francis said. He speculated that the boxes might be found this time, too.

United Takes Action

As the work continued, the effects of the crash began to ripple through the airline industry. United Airlines said Tuesday it was imposing strict new security measures in reaction to the TWA disaster and passing the cost on in the price of a ticket.

Among the restrictions will be a refusal to accept small packages for shipments without opening them first, demanding two forms of identification from passengers and stepping up spot searches of bags on international trips.

United said it also may begin requiring that all luggage on domestic trips be “matched” to passengers who are actually boarding the flights--a procedure that so far has been limited to international flights only.

It was not immediately clear how soon United’s new measures would spread to other airlines. Spokesmen for other carriers interviewed by wire services either declined to comment or expressed satisfaction with current policies.

Separately, TWA’s president, Jeffrey Erickson, told reporters on Tuesday that investigators no longer were looking to possible maintenance problems as the most likely cause of the crash of Flight 800. But he declined to speculate on what might have caused the crash.

Erickson also said TWA’s international bookings had declined since the explosion occurred one week ago and the number of passengers not showing up for flights on which they had been booked had increased significantly.

Pine reported from Washington and Malnic from East Moriches. Times staff writers Richard A. Serrano, Alan C. Miller, Marc Lacey and John J. Goldman, reporting from New York, also contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Voice and Date Recorders

Some of the most vital pieces of information on the downed plane are likely to come from the 747’s flight data recorders, which are still being sought in the waters off Long Island. There are two separate units on each plane, one each for voice and data. The boxes, which look virtually the same, can detect pilot error and equipment malfunction, or show that a disaster was probably caused by a bomb.

ABOUT THE COCKPIT RECORDER

The cockpit voice recorder is a continuous loop system that records all the sounds from the cockpit.

* Records last 30 minutes of conversation.

* Captures conversations, alarms, even the sounds of some of the controls being moved. A clicking noise can be traced to a particular control and will sometimes give clues as to just what the cockpit crew was doing.

* Contents only made public in transcript form. Tape itself is never played publicly.

****

ABOUT FLIGHT DATA RECORDER

Contains as many as 114 pieces of information, depending on model.

* Recording spans plane’s past 25 hours.

* Records: Speed, Altitude, Engine thrust, Wing flap positions, Fuel levels, Flight control positions

****

DESCRIPTIONS (Both the voice and the data recorders look the same)

Size: Like large mailboxes

Weight: 10 kilograms

High fire temperature exposure: Resist up to 1 hour

****