Recovery of All 230 Bodies in Jet Crash Called Unlikely

With 35 victims still unaccounted for, federal officials announced Wednesday that it appears unlikely all 230 of the bodies of the passengers and crew aboard TWA Flight 800 will ever be found.

That grim appraisal came on a day when officials also announced that up to 30% of the plane’s wreckage has now been recovered from the Atlantic Ocean, including a 20,000-pound left wing that was severely burned at the point where it once had been attached to the main fuselage.

In addition, federal criminal investigators said that even as more wreckage is being recovered, it still could be weeks before experts pinpoint what caused the Boeing 747 to explode at 13,000 feet above Long Island and then fall into the sea on July 17.

For several days, no more bodies have been spotted or recovered along the plane’s debris field, sitting about 120 feet underwater. At a Ramada hotel near John F. Kennedy Airport, only a dozen families remain awaiting word of their loved ones.

Robert Francis, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said that Navy divers and other salvage workers are finding increasingly fewer pieces of wreckage--a sign that fewer bodies will be found nearby.

“Obviously it’s still our first priority to find victims,” Francis said. “But quite frankly, there are not the kinds of wreckage still out there where we would expect to find bodies.

“So in fairness to the families that are out there waiting, time is something that is not helping. And my impression is the families are being understanding.”

James K. Kallstrom, an FBI assistant director, said the families that still have received no word are gently being prepared for the worst.

“I’m sure they are terribly disappointed,” he said. “But they should know we are trying as hard as we can to find them.”

Kallstrom, who heads up the FBI’s New York field office, said that some federal agents who had been working on the crash have been reassigned to their regular duties. He was still reluctant to predict when the FBI and the NTSB would announce whether the disaster was a mechanical failure or an act of sabotage.

“Who knows?” he said. “But we’re getting a lot of the plane every day. So at some point in time, the plane is going to talk to us and tell us what happened. And hopefully sooner than later.”

Some sources theorize that the explosion occurred near the front of the plane, perhaps in the forward cargo area. Kallstrom said Wednesday that three cargo containers have been recovered so far. One was intact; the other two were heavily damaged.

But he said even that evidence might turn out to be inconclusive as to whether a bomb or something else caused the damage.

“The thing I’ve learned is that there is so much damage from it hitting the water that it is very, very difficult to draw any conclusions about what caused all this damage,” he said. “I’ll leave that up to the PhDs in chemistry and physics and everybody else that we have looking at this stuff.”

Francis said it was too early to tell what caused the fire on the large wing section.

He also said that tests will be made on two of the plane’s engines to see if the blast pushed the fan blades into the rubber strips around the engines.

“That rub strip might implicate something about what the forces were like that were acting on the aircraft,” he said. “It’s important to us to find out where those forces came from, and what forces came to bear on the engines.”