On Wednesday, July 17, 1996, at 8:19 p.m., TWA Flight 800 took off from JFK airport and headed out over Long Island toward Paris. It was a perfect summer night, 70 degrees, the sky clear.
Twelve minutes later, TWA 800 exploded mid-air, killing all 230 people on board. The crash was close enough to the coast that plane wreckage washed up on Suffolk County beaches for weeks.
“There was a wall of flame 30 feet high,” Suffolk County police officer Vincent Termine, who witnessed the explosion, told the Independent in 1997. He said it looked like the ocean was on fire.
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