When TWA Flight 800 exploded in the sky off Long Island on the evening of 17 July, the Island-class Coast Guard cutter Adak (WPB-1333) was nearby on routine fisheries patrol.
“Some people on board actually saw the fireball, and the captain headed toward it,” recalled Boatswain’s Mate Jeff Ruggieri. The 110-foot vessel arrived at the crash site about 40 minutes later and, as the first official rescue vessel on scene, took charge of the armada of Coast Guard, police, and pleasure craft that began arriving to look for survivors.
By the time the rescue effort evolved into a dogged recovery project over the subsequent weeks, the Coast Guard, Navy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and private contractors had deployed dozens of ships and aircraft and several thousand personnel in an unprecedented operation that covered thousands of square miles on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean and hundreds of square miles of the sea floor.
Initially, it was the Coast Guard’s show, as it pulled in ships and aircraft from the Carolinas to Cape Cod, coordinated the search for bodies, and ably handled a crush of media from as far away as France.
The first Coast Guard units to respond—cutters, local station boats ranging up to 44 feet, and helicopters—found the sea aflame with burning jet fuel and littered with seats, insulation, and bodies. “It was like a movie set,” said Ruggieri, who led a crew in a rigid-hull inflatable to recover bodies. “Few of them [bodies] were intact,” he said. “Some were missing limbs or were decapitated. We tried not to look at the faces. If you didn’t look at the faces, it wasn’t personal, but we treated the bodies with dignity. It was something we didn’t want to have to do. But we did it for the families. We were hoping that someone would be found alive. When I had some time to think about it, I said to myself, ‘Nobody could survive this.’”
At the peak of the Coast Guard’s surface search. 10 cutters up to 270 feet in length, 29 small boats, 4 helicopters, 2 Guardian jets, a C-130, and more than 500 personnel were involved. To recover every piece of floating debris, the Coast Guard eventually searched about 50,000 square miles, an area more than twice the size of Rhode Island.
As the surface search tapered off, the Coast Guard continued to maintain the five-mile security zone around the site and shifted its other vessels from where the current had carried floatable debris back to the impact area. Coast Guard vessels were then charged with recovering any wreckage—or bodies—that might float to the surface as the Navy salvage work began.
Meanwhile, the Navy was gearing up to search for victims and wreckage on the bottom at depths of between 105 and 150 feet. The Navy was charged with the underwater search and recovery operation, taking its cues from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which had overall control of the investigation with significant input from the FBI, which would maintain the secondary role until proof of a criminal act could be found. The NTSB-FBI partnership was a first, but the two agencies eventually developed common working ground. And the sea services were pressured to let the lead agencies do most of the talking, even if it cost them media exposure that would be valuable when Congress was appropriating.
The first Navy personnel arrived at the East Moriches Coast Guard Station a day after the crash. Captain Chip McCord of the Ocean Engineering and Salvage Diving Unit based in Virginia and his advance team began planning for operations by the initial contingent of 16 Navy divers and four support personnel who followed and worked with state and local police and New York City Fire Department divers.
The Navy also called in Oceaneering International, a Maryland contractor that handles technical support work for salvage operations. The firm brought in the vessel Pirouette to do side-scan sonar surveying to locate the debris fields along with the NOAA survey vessel Rude, which arrived the day after the crash in time to pick up two wing segments floating on the surface. Mapping work provided targets that were examined by remote cameras, a laser line scan system set up on the vessel Diane G., and divers.
This was the first time the laser system was used in an accident investigation. It could scan a 100-foot swath of the ocean floor while moving at up to 7 knots and produce images clear enough so that rivets on the 747’s fuselage could be made out. The system arrived nine days after the plane exploded at the request of Oceaneering International and was deployed by its commercial operator. Science Applications International Corp. It located two bodies by the next morning. Laser scanning also revealed pieces of luggage, bags, books, seats, and other debris on the sandy bottom. Among the most dramatic parts of the plane spotted was a 20-foot section of the fuselage on which the laser showed windows and the letters T, r, and a, from Trans World Airlines, painted on the side of the aircraft.
The laser system, built by the Northrop Corporation before its merger with Grumman, is towed in a container about 4-by-8 feet, just off the bottom. It works by shooting a pencil-thin, blue-green laser beam into a rotating pyramid of four mirrors that directs the beam downward to the sea floor and makes it sweep one way across the bottom. A synchronized receiver with its own mirrors tracks the beam, recording what the laser illuminates as the ship moves through the water.
Eventually, the Navy presence expanded to include the 609-foot dock landing ship Oak Hill (LSD-51), the salvage ships Grasp (ARS-51) and Grapple (ARS-53), several small dive boats, and the two vessels operated by contractors. Pirouette and Diane G. Three weeks after the crash 650 Navy and contract personnel—including more than 115 divers—were stationed off Long Island.
The Grasp and the Grapple each were equipped with cranes and winches capable of lifting up to 300 tons, although the heaviest pieces of wreckage were expected to be the engines, weighing from 7,000 to 9,000 pounds. The ships also had “hard-hat” surface-supplied-air dive teams that could stay on the bottom in the crash area for up 90 minutes by doing decompression dives followed by about a half hour in the on-board recompression chambers. But the Navy tried to limit the dives to an hour. Each ship had a remote-operated vehicle (ROV) that could take video footage, conduct sonar scanning, and even lift smaller objects.
Conditions under water were treacherous. Visibility averaged 10 to 15 feet. Several divers suffered decompression illness; others were trapped in the jagged wreckage and maze of wiring and had to be cut free by other divers. The ROV’s hydraulic lines were sliced by sharp metal. And rough seas forced several suspensions of underwater operations.
Criticism came from Senator Alfonse D’Amato (R-NY) and other politicians that the Navy was too slow in bringing in additional ships and divers. But the Navy insisted it staged the arrival of its resources so they would be on hand by the time they were needed. The Navy said it needed to have a complete map of the debris areas before anything was recovered to avoid compromising the investigation. This brought additional criticism from victims’ families and political leaders, but others—including New York Governor George Pataki—praised the Navy’s operation and procedures.
The completion of the initial mapping took just more than 24 hours, and then the divers went to work. Navy Chief Petty Officer Kevin Oelhafen and Petty Officer Douglas Irish found the 747’s “black box” flight recorders a week after the crash. The black boxes, which are actually orange, were discovered when the divers stumbled on them by accident at about 2320 after being lowered to a depth of about 150 feet on a stage platform from the Grasp.
“As I stood off the stage about three feet, an orange box was right there,” Oelhafen recalled. “I would have stepped right on it.” Irish spotted the second box.
The remote submersible on the Grapple—known as Deep Drone—was used to locate the cockpit. By the third week after the crash, most of the large chunks of wreckage, representing about one-third of the plane, had been raised by the Grasp and the Grapple. The fragments of the plane were trucked to a Grumman hangar at Calverton, Long Island, to be reassembled by the NTSB and Boeing.
Mr. Bleyer is a staff writer for Newsday, Long Island, New York, and is a frequent contributor to U.S. Naval Institute publications.