Doomed Jetliner’s Cockpit Tape Ends in Mystery Sound

The cockpit-voice recording aboard Trans World Airlines Flight 800 ends with an unidentified sound only a fraction of a second long, government investigators said Thursday, deepening suspicions that a bomb sent the plane crashing into the Atlantic Ocean.

“About 11 1/2 minutes after takeoff, the recording ended abruptly,” Robert Francis, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, told a news conference. “All four CVR [cockpit-voice recorder] channels recorded a brief, fraction-of-a-second sound just prior to the end of the tape.”

Francis and other officials declined to offer possible explanations for such a sound. But other aviation experts, including one involved in the investigation of the 1988 bombing of a Pan American Airways flight over Scotland, noted that such an abrupt ending is consistent with planes struck by powerful bombs.

James K. Kallstrom, the chief FBI investigator, used his strongest language to date about the prospect of foul play.

“We know that there was a catastrophic explosion. It was caused by some kind of bomb, obviously,” he said. But he quickly modified that statement, saying there still is a chance that the explosion “had nothing to do with terrorism or criminality” or involved “something in the cargo that would have caused a mechanical problem.”

However, other experts said most known mechanical malfunctions would provide some advance warning or indication of trouble.

The voice recorder and the flight-data recorder, the airplane’s so-called black boxes, were brought to the surface about midnight EDT Wednesday after divers found them amid submerged wreckage about 10 miles offshore. The devices were flown to Washington, where experts began an exhaustive technical analysis that will take days.

With experts working around the clock with the data from the recorders, which monitor multiple aspects of the plane’s mechanical performance, “I suspect within 24 hours, within 48 hours, relatively soon, we’ll have answers” on the crash’s cause, Kallstrom said.

Francis said Thursday afternoon that no analysis of the information had been made, and he added that those who had listened to the recording, which was made by four microphones sensitive enough to pick up the crew’s voices and other sounds in the airplane, had not characterized what they had heard.

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As the analysis was underway, President Clinton flew to New York and spent nearly 3 1/2 hours with relatives of the flight’s 230 victims, who had been traveling to Paris when the plane exploded shortly after leaving New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Seeking to console them, Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton--at times with tears in her eyes--visited individually with many of the relatives. A number of the family members have grown increasingly vocal and angry in recent days over the pace of the recovery of bodies from the ocean floor and at what they have said was inadequate information about the recovery effort.

The delays and complaints have threatened to become an embarrassment for the administration.

“These families have suffered enormous pain. They were still in a great deal of pain, and I know we can all understand not only their pain but the frustration that they feel at the time it is taking to recover their loved ones and get answers,” Clinton said after meeting with the relatives.

The president apologized to the 500 people gathered at the Ramada Plaza Hotel for the delayed and sometimes inaccurate information they had been receiving, saying he would ask Congress to fund a special government office to attend to families’ needs after such air disasters--much like the assistance the federal government provides victims of storms and other disasters.

Clinton’s comments were translated into French and Italian for the families of victims from those countries. Few of the families offered public comments after the meeting, but several New York officials who were present said it appeared to comfort many of the relatives.

Richard Penzer, a Long Island real estate developer whose sister, Judy, was on the flight, said Clinton “was just very assuring as a human being. No artifice.”

Penzer’s wife, Jacki, said a man in front her on the receiving line expressed angry complaints to Hillary Clinton who, she said, listened patiently. “She was encouraging him: ‘Tell me,’ ” Jacki Penzer said.

White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said the Clintons spent three to five minutes with each family group, asking about loved ones they had lost, “sometimes exchanging hugs, sometimes exchanging tears.”

Clinton assured them, said White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta, that the government’s “first priority was the recovery of their loved ones and the identification of their loved ones.”

As of Thursday afternoon, Francis said, 126 bodies had been recovered--including 12 on Thursday--and that 111 had been identified.

Meanwhile, crews from three Navy vessels worked at the crash site and below the surface to map the disaster area and to search for more bodies and debris.

Underwater operations were continuing, involving “hard-hat” Navy divers, who use oxygen-supply lines connected to their vessels, allowing them to work beneath the surface for extended periods. Crews were also operating a remote-control camera and sonar that scans in multiple directions for underwater objects.

Working in calm seas, recovery workers said they were optimistic that more bodies and wreckage would be found through Thursday night and this morning.

The discovery of the black boxes was an important milestone for the investigation, even if the data fails to provide specific evidence of what occurred in the moments before the plane disintegrated and fell into the ocean.

On a cockpit-voice recorder, the sound of voices ending abruptly, capped with a sound, “clearly means a major catastrophic event that is external, either a bomb or a missile,” said former CIA counter-terrorism chief Vince Canistraro, who helped investigate the 1988 Lockerbie, Scotland, crash, which was caused by a terrorist bomb.

But to be certain that a bomb was involved, he said, investigators “will need lab proof, which includes residue of a bomb.”

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Kallstrom, an assistant FBI director, said that in determining whether a catastrophic human or mechanical failure was responsible or whether the tragedy was attributable to a bomb or missile strike--the bureau was “assuming, for the purposes of our investigation, that it is criminal.”

“We make that assumption so we will have a launching pad to move and move quickly,” he said.

He said he was not worried that evidence on the debris sitting in the saltwater would be damaged as divers and others in the recovery crew work first to retrieve the submerged bodies.

“The information is not being lost, I can assure you of that,” he said. “We wouldn’t let it be lost. And we’ll be here in the very near future to tell you exactly what happened here.”

Kallstrom, who is heading up a task force of federal, state and local officials, said investigators are comparing information from the TWA crash with that of the Lockerbie tragedy, both involving Boeing 747s.

Officials said no large pieces of the plane were retrieved Thursday, although small pieces were brought to the surface by divers.

Francis, who with other officials reported to Clinton on the investigation’s progress, said the cockpit-voice recorder “indicated a routine preflight takeoff and departure from JFK International” before it abruptly ended after 11 1/2 minutes.

He said no analysis had been made of the sound heard at the end of the tape. However, sources close to the investigation said an explosion--which is a form of a sound wave--could register on a cockpit-voice recorder.

The sources said painstaking analysis of such sounds sometimes can provide clues about what sort of explosion occurred and where in the aircraft it occurred.

Francis said that while both recorders sustained “moderate impact damage,” they were providing good information. There was no evidence of fire damage to either recorder, he said.

The flight-data recorder contains 19 elements of information about the airplane’s performance in the air. These include the plane’s altitude, rate of climb, speed, position in the air, the thrust of each engine and the position of various controls as well as of the wing flaps and rudder.

There was some damage to the tape in the flight-data recorder during the final few seconds that was caused by saltwater, but Francis said it is expected that all pertinent data will be recovered.

Times staff writers Paul Richter, Alan C. Miller, Gebe Martinez, Robin Wright, Art Pine and James Gerstenzang and special correspondent Lisa Meyer contributed to this story.

More on the Web

* You’ll find more on the crash of TWA Flight 800 on The Times’ World Wide Web site: Stories, photos and links to Web sites of the investigating agencies, TWA and Newsday, the Long Island newspaper. You can also send a message to the community of Montoursville, Pa., which lost students and chaperons in the crash. Go to: https://www.latimes.com/twacrash