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The sun hung low among the towers of New York City casting final shadows across JFK International Airport.
At 2017:18 Eastern Daylight Time, Trans World Airlines Flight 800 from New York to Paris was instructed to hold short of JFK’s Runway 22R. A landing 757 had kicked up some heavy wake turbulence that would take half a minute to subside. The 747-100, with two hundred and ten passengers and eighteen crew members aboard, held their position for a minute and three seconds.
While idling at the edge of the runway, the cockpit flight crew remained focused on completing the pre-takeoff checklist. The flight hadn’t gotten off to a good start and the four men were all glad to finally be on the move.
The 747 had landed from Athens on schedule at 1631 hours. For cabin comfort, the APU—Auxiliary Power Unit, a small engine used as a generator to power the plane’s systems—was kept powered up to run two of its three air conditioners to mitigate the heavy heat of the July sun beating down from the partly cloudy skies over New York.
Three of the crew had over sixty thousand hours combined flight experience, much of it in the 747. The fourth was relatively new to the 747, a trainee flight engineer. At twenty-four years old, he had over two thousand hours of flight time as an engineer, but only thirty of those were in a 747. His trainer on this flight was two years from retirement and did his best not to think how much he’d miss the big plane that had dominated his forty-year career.
Over the previous two and a half hours, the plane had been emptied, serviced, and reloaded with passengers and their luggage.
Rather than departing for Charles de Gaulle at 1900 hours as scheduled, there had been multiple delays.
First, a service vehicle had broken down, blocking the plane at Gate 27 until it could be towed clear.
Once it was clear, there was a further delay as gate personnel insisted that a piece of luggage had to be pulled from the hold because the passenger hadn’t boarded. Eventually the luggage and its owner were both located. The owner sat already aboard the plane, seriously considering several scotches once they were aloft. The overexcited high school French class, looking forward to their first trip to France, were boisterously annoying. It was going to be a long damn flight and scotch was definitely in order. Despite the delays, he’d still be in time for his lunch meeting. The French would just have to take him in whatever state he was in.
The bag was returned to the hold.
Of only slightly more concern, the captain’s weather radar wasn’t working properly. Maintenance marked it as inoperative and, per regulation, ordered service at the next opportunity within ten days. The copilot’s radar was operative, so the flight was finally cleared for departure.
At 2018:21, the tower transmitted final wind conditions and cleared TWA 800 for departure. They rolled down Runway 22R and lifted into the air well before midfield as they carried only two-thirds capacity. The final fuel load had been adjusted downward to avoid carrying any extra weight across the Atlantic. As a result, the large central wing tank sat mostly empty.
Over the next eleven minutes, as air traffic control routed the flight east to higher flight levels through the typical clutter of jet traffic, there was only one unusual comment captured by the Cockpit Voice Recorder.
At 2029:15, the captain remarked, “Look at that crazy fuel flow indicator on Number Four…see that?”
There was no follow-up comment captured by the CVR.
A minute and fifty-seven seconds subsequent to that remark, at 2031:12 after the flight was cleared to climb to fifteen thousand feet, the CVR abruptly ceased operation. For just over a tenth of a second before it did, a very loud sound was recorded.
It stopped recording because a frayed fuel gauge wire, probably chafed by a sagging air duct, sparked. The spark occurred inside the nearly empty central wing tank, now primarily filled with a highly combustible fuel/air mixture. The mixture had been further heated and concentrated during the overlong wait on the tarmac by the heat exchangers for the air conditioning units—mounted directly below the tank.
When the fuel/air mixture ignited, an intense explosion sliced the airplane in two, immediately ahead of the wings. This severed the wiring to the flight recorders as well as killing many of the passengers instantly—mostly by snapping their necks. Those who survived in the main body of the aircraft died from inhaling the burning air rolling through the cabin like a roiling wall of death.
Approximately five seconds later, the nose of the plane—including the flight deck and first-class passenger section—broke free and began its long, eighty-three-second fall to the ocean.

Initial Publication: September 26, 2023
Print Pages: 396
Audio length: 9:56
Narrator: Read by Author

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