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In a hotel in St. Louis, the 30-year veteran pilot who had been scheduled to serve as first officer on Flight 800 could not bring himself to feel lucky. He had been pulled off because a fellow first officer needed to meet his deadline for an annual in-flight "check"--part of the system that monitors pilots' skills throughout their career. "Most pilots are fatalistic," he said about his good fortune. But he and other TWA pilots had little, if any, doubts about the cause of the tragedy. "That aircraft has had 25 years' experience without a catastrophic accident," says a veteran, and "747s don't just fall out of the air." Adds the lucky first officer: "There is nothing a crew member can do to make a plane blow up like that."
WHAT CAUSED THE TRAGEDY?
The explosive end of Flight 800 stirred immediate speculation of a bomb. The involvement of roughly 100 FBI agents on the case further confirmed notions that terrorists were involved. One theory that arose the day after the crash: a surface-to-air missile had brought down the 747, perhaps a shoulder-launched Stinger missile, of the type smuggled by the U.S. into Afghanistan in the late 1980s to help rebels battle the Soviet-backed government. But while federal officials had not ruled out an attack by a surface-to-air missile, they privately viewed the possibility as remote.
Even if they could not say how the plane blew up, federal aviation authorities were reluctantly coming to the conclusion that the crash was the result of an act of terrorism. Although TWA had been criticized by distraught relatives for failing to confirm the names of victims quickly enough, the airline swiftly turned over the passenger manifest to federal intelligence officials so they could scrutinize it for possible leads.
But the crucial clues are likely to be gleaned from the 747's so-called black boxes (now actually colored bright orange): one that records the cockpit's communications with ground control and another that monitors the plane's vital functions. Given the sudden end of the flight, the second box may provide more useful data. Experts, however, may be able to detect the "signature sounds" of a bomb explosion on the cockpit voice recorder. Last week the sturdily armored recorders were still beneath the sea, but there were indications on Saturday that the steady beeps given off by the black boxes had been detected by sonar.
THE BOMB SCENARIOS
On Wednesday the plane that would become the fatal Flight 800 to Paris had touched down in New York after a flight that originated at the airport in Athens, Greece, an aging facility with a reputation for lax security. After the explosion, suspicions were immediately voiced that terrorists might have planted a bomb in Athens, set to go off when the plane turned around in New York and headed for France. Greek authorities were livid at the implication.