Crash Evidence Points to Bomb

Information from air-traffic control radar, the recently recovered aircraft “black boxes” and the pattern of debris on the ocean floor indicates that Trans World Airlines Flight 800 was rocked by a blast on the right side of the plane before being engulfed in a fireball, a leading investigator said Friday.

Although the National Transportation Safety Board and the FBI continued to defer final judgment on the cause of the crash, the investigator said the evidence collected so far is consistent with a bomb, with no other likely explanation. The investigator talked to a reporter on the understanding he would not be identified by name.

The investigator said information from radar and the black boxes--the plane’s cockpit-voice and flight-data recorders--shows that the plane lost electrical power and began an abrupt descent that lasted about 41 seconds before a fire tore through the plane. He said it appears that an initial explosion shattered the plane’s mechanical equipment and ruptured its fuel tanks, although the fire did not start immediately because it took time for the fuel to mix with enough air to cause it to ignite.

The investigator said there is still no evidence of the chemical residue that is the tell-tale signature of most bombs, but the position of two distinct underwater debris fields indicates that something blasted through the right side of the aircraft before the rest of the wreckage fell into the sea.

Also Friday, Robert Francis, the vice chairman of the NTSB who is heading up the investigation, told reporters that two of the aircraft’s four engines were discovered under 120 feet of water by Navy technicians using a special remote-control camera. But he said the engines probably will not be recovered until the remains of all of the victims have been located.

Francis said 140 bodies had been recovered by Friday afternoon. Of those, 131 have been positively identified and five have been tentatively identified.

The engines are potentially important evidence because they should show with certainty if the crash could have been caused by a catastrophic mechanical failure, Francis explained. The flight-data recorder showed that all of the engines were working normally until the moment the electricity failed, he said.

Francis said analysis of radar and black-box data shows that the plane remained aloft for the 41 seconds after it lost electric power, cutting off both the recorders. He did not speculate on whether passengers and crew were still alive during that time.

The investigator who declined to be identified filled in some of the details.

He explained that air-traffic radar consists of two separate systems, a primary system that records the position and speed of the aircraft and a more sophisticated one that communicates with a transponder aboard the plane. In the case of Flight 800, the transponder and the black boxes quit within a fraction of a second of each other after the plane lost electrical power. The primary radar showed that the plane continued at about 400 mph, then disappeared from the screen, engulfed in the fireball.

Much of the wreckage debris is spread in the same direction as the plane had been flying, the expected pattern caused by the plane’s inertia. But the investigator said there is a smaller debris field located to the right of the plane’s track and behind the position recorded by the final radar image. He said this could only have resulted if something had been blown out of the plane at about the time the black boxes and transponder cut out.

The investigator said specialists know of no kind of mechanical failure that would produce such a debris pattern.

Pilots Witness Tragedy

The investigator said the information gained from the black boxes and radar is remarkably consistent with many eyewitness accounts, especially with the version told by nine pilots who were in the air at the time.

A military C-130 turboprop plane and a Blackhawk helicopter arrived at the scene so soon after seeing the fireball that they both were forced to take evasive maneuvers to avoid falling debris, investigators said.

Other witnesses included the pilots of an Alitalia plane flying behind the TWA plane, a Piedmont commuter plane approaching from the south at 11,000 feet and an Eastwind Airlines jet that was turning to the southwest over eastern Long Island at 16,000 feet. That plane, several miles away, was pointed head to head with Flight 800.

Investigators said that while the pilots gave slightly different versions of events, they were “pretty consistent” in saying that the fireball began at between 8,000 and 9,000 feet. At a minimum, they said, it is almost certain that the fireball began after the plane began its rapid descent.

At the news briefing, James K. Kallstrom, the FBI’s top official on the case, said his agents have interviewed a number of witnesses who recall seeing something in the air “ascending” toward the aircraft, possibly the track of a ground-to-air missile. But he said it is more likely that the witnesses saw something streaking away from the doomed aircraft, possibly burning debris from the initial explosion.

“We have a number of people here in the community who have seen things, some of which are very similar when grouped together, other things that are not quite the same,” he said. But the investigators have “low confidence in all the reports that it might have been a missile.”

“Several witnesses saw something departing the airplane before the fireball,” he said. “Some of them said it glowed red. That could be fire. We are trying to determine what it was.”

Kallstrom said he was not yet ready to declare absolutely that the plane was felled by a bomb.

“I think we’ve moved the ball a few more yards down the field,” he said. “We’re not here to declare what everybody is discussing in the newspapers [a bomb], but I think we are closer to that.”

Investigators also are trying to find out if there is any connection between the crash and the fact that a container labeled “eye corneas” was placed in the cockpit just before the plane took off, Kallstrom said. The package was addressed to a hospital in France for use in a transplant. Although there is no evidence that the package was anything other than what it seemed, he said, the incident poses questions.

“Obviously we’ve looked at the entire chain of events there,” Kallstrom said. “We’ve interviewed everybody involved in that. It’s in our baseline information. So we’re looking at that very closely.”

Examining the Engines

Francis said it is not clear whether the engines discovered Friday are intact, or whether they splintered during the explosion and crash. He also said officials are unsure how they will retrieve the engines, each of which weighs between 7,000 and 9,000 pounds. “They’re not the easiest thing in the world to lift,” he said.

“There’s a lot of wreckage down there and with all that wreckage, obviously, it is a dangerous place to be working,” he added. “There’s a lot of sharp metal, torn metal, wire. They are being prudent down there and that is why this is going to take some time.”

Francis conceded that the administration’s decision to put the recovery of victims at the top of the priority list will delay the overall investigation by slowing the recovery of aircraft debris. But he predicted that investigators will eventually determine with certainty the cause of the crash.

Navy Rear Adm. Edward Kristensen, who is overseeing the underwater recovery and salvage operation, said no divers have been injured. But several have had to spend time in decompression chambers before being able to dive again, he said.

Times staff writer Norm Kempster in Washington contributed to this story.

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The Shower of Debris

Debris from the explosion of TWA Flight 800 was captured on these weather radar images. The debris created a radar image comparable to a brief, moderate rain shower, according to Mike Smith, president of WeatherData, Inc., who provided the images to The Times. The images were recorded in Boston; the Long Island radar was not operating at the time of the explosion.

Image 1: No radar echoes from the area south of Long Island where the plane was flying when it exploded, just small bands of showers along the Connecticut coast and at the eastern tip of Long Island.

Image 2: Radar image of the explosion shows a diamond-shaped radar image. The image is estimated at about three miles across. The echoes were caused by small particles which floated slowly down, not larger pieces that rapidly fell to the ocean.

Image 3: Six minutes later, the radar echo from the debris has elongated to an area about five miles long.

Finding these images: These radar images were not examined until Thursday because the weather in the immediate vicinity of the explosion was clear and dismissed as a possible factor in the crash.

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About Doppler Radar

A doppler radar image is constructed by computer from a single 360-degree sweep of the radar antenna. It measures the intensity of rain drops and computes wind speeds in clear air, and is very sensitive to small particles in the atmosphere. It routinely shows smoke clouds from forest fires and even captured the smoke rising from last year’s bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.

Researched by RICHARD O’REILLY / Los Angeles Times

Source: Mike Smith, WeatherData Inc.