Shirley, N.Y. – Family members of the 230 victims of the TWA Flight 800 crash gathered with those who tried to rescue their loved ones on a Long Island beach to mark the 20th anniversary of the disaster.
“It’s been a difficult 20 years,” John Seaman, head of the TWA Flight 800 Families Association, told several hundred people gathered Sunday for an hour-long service at a permanent memorial.
The midair explosion of Flight 800 moments after the flight left Kennedy Airport spawned a yearlong FBI probe and initially was thought to have been downed by a bomb or missile.
The National Transportation Safety Board eventually concluded that the probable cause was faulty wiring sparking an explosion of overheated vapors in the plane’s center fuel tank.
