Flight 800 and a Mother’s Pain

The arduous probe ended officially this week, with a riveting videotape and an FBI pronouncement that it was neither sabotage nor friendly fire that caused TWA Flight 800 to explode last year over the Atlantic Ocean.

Just what it was that destroyed the plane and killed the 230 people on board we still don’t know . . . and may never know. But it wasn’t Lockerbie redux; no terrorist bomb, no enemy missile, the FBI says.

We can file this under “mechanical failure” and move on, and accept that something as simple as a shaky bolt or a short-circuit could blow a jumbo jet to oblivion in the blink of an eye.

But to do that, you must ignore the elderly woman going door to door in Glendale, asking her neighbors in a voice trembling with indignation to please sign her petition, begging the U.S. government to come clean and admit that a missile blew up that plane.

“I will keep this going as long as I live, because I am furious . . . because what the FBI says is a lie,” says Flora Headley, whose son was among those killed in the July 17, 1996, explosion.

“They think in time people will forget, that it will just be something that happened and we’ll say, ‘Oh, well. . . . ‘

“But I am the mother of the pilot. And I will not go away.”

*

Ralph G. Kevorkian was a veteran pilot who’d logged more than 20,000 miles in the air. A safety-conscious stickler for detail, he was often assigned by TWA to sit in with less-experienced pilots to help evaluate and counsel their cockpit crews.

He was at the controls of Flight 800 when it took off from New York’s JFK airport, then disappeared from radar screens and plunged, in fiery pieces, into the sea.

The black box recovered from the ocean floor recorded not a word, not a gasp, not a sound uttered by Kevorkian or his cockpit crew in the moments before the plane went down.

And that, in part, is why his mother is convinced that the government’s story cannot be true. Because if it were, she believes, her son might have found a way to save his plane.

“If it was a mechanical problem, my son would have had a chance to say something,” she says, her voice rising with an anger that has been building these past 16 months. “The plane was going down and my son, a 31-year pilot, was in command. . . . So how come the black box was empty, not a sound?”

She will tell you why: Because the plane was blown out of the air, with no warning, no chance to escape. Maybe it was a mistake, an accident. But now it is being covered up to save face. And that has tarnished the memory of her son--the boy who always wanted to be a pilot, the man who always did his profession proud.

“I know it was a missile,” she says to anyone who’ll listen. “Maybe it was a foreign missile. . . . We were attacked and the government doesn’t want us to know. Or it was a Navy missile, our own. . . .

“That would make everybody nervous; it would destroy our confidence. So they hide it.”

She is not alone with her missile theories. The Internet is rife with conspiracy rumors, and a national poll taken a few months after the crash indicated that more than half the American public believed there was a cover-up going on.

In fact, the FBI’s extraordinary display this week--its Tuesday news conference featuring a CIA-produced, computer-generated video reenactment of the fiery crash--was intended to dispel such theories and restore public confidence in an investigation in which 7,000 people were interviewed and a million pieces of the plane examined before the declaration that no criminal or military act brought it down.

But it will take more than that to convince Flora Headley that her son--and his crew and passengers--died simply because some little part of the plane didn’t work quite right this time around.

*

It’s easy to poke holes in her aviation theories, to dismiss Headley as a crackpot, an old lady who’s read one too many National Enquirers.

It’s harder to ignore the pain that seeps out through her angry diatribes--the pain of an 86-year-old woman who came here from Persia after World War I, and later lost the light of her life in a crash that still defies explanation.

I first encountered her six months ago when, as a reporter, I set out to track down the families and friends of those killed for a crash anniversary story on how they’d fared.

I heard tales of grief and suffering, of entire families lost and lifelong friends torn apart. I found inspiration in the memorial services and scholarship funds. And I found a little old lady transformed by pain and anger into a soldier, at war with the world over the untimely, unfortunate, unfair death of her only child.

Like most close relatives of those aboard, she has journeyed to New York--with her grandson, Kevorkian’s grown son--to memorials for the victims. But she has stood apart from the crowd in her steadfast refusal to accept any sort of benign explanation.

She was not invited--not even notified, she says--to hear the FBI announce its findings privately to the families this week. But they will not keep her away next month, when the National Transportation Safety Board conducts its public hearings on the crash.

And I find myself not pitying Flora Headley so much as admiring her resolve.

For in the end, it’s not about conspiracies and cover-ups and whether you believe our government could let an airplane get shot down, then concoct a lie to hide it.

It’s more about a mother losing a son, and struggling to face a tragedy too painful to endure without believing that somewhere, someone is to blame.

* Sandy Banks’ column is published Mondays and Fridays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.