TWA 800 anniversary

[LoLPilot]

Today’s the 23rd anniversary of the Flight 800 explosion. What’s eerie is there’s a channel of a guy who recreated aviation incidents using FS2004 and FSX and I was scrolling through his vids and selected his 800 video because I hadn’t seen it before, and it started out saying “July 17, 1996...”

Certainly a tragedy, and for me kind of a morbid motivator that brought me here. I got home from spending the day at my grandparents and my 8 year old self saw a burning fuel slick on TV. I asked what it was and one of my parents said there was a plane crash. After that I was terrified of airplanes to the point of not going on trips or sitting with a white knuckle grip on the armrests. I finally decided to change that in 2014 with a flight in a Piper Tomahawk. Now I’m working on completing my IR.

But for some reason I’ve always thought of the 800 crash as especially sad because it wasn’t human error or malevolence that brought that plane down. It was that crew and passengers being betrayed by the machine that they entrusted their lives to.

 

[inactive15]

At the time of the crash I was working night shift installing Cat5 cables at Winthrop University Hospital in Mineola Long Island. When the crash was reported in the media the hospital immediately began preparing for the potential arrival of victims. It was a somber moment when by early morning everyone realized the event was not survivable.

 

[AlleyCat67]

It’s strange to think that as recently as the 1980’s, it was routine to have 3-4 major airline accidents every year in the U.S. Now it’s basically unheard of.

 

[Ted]

I remember that crash. I was at summer sleepaway camp. We saw a newspaper article about it. Later, I'd heard a friend's mother had witnessed the event and was on the news with her account of it. Crazy.