WestCon Tribune

SEPTEMBER MEETING

Reconstruction of TWA Flight 800:
A Tale of Five Million
Not-So-Easy Pieces

Presented By:Kent Sasaki, Branch Manager,
Wiss, Janney, Elstner Ass

Inside a Grumman airplane hanger on eastern Long Island sat the charred and mangled remains of TWA Flight 800, reconstructed so precisely that the windows are neatly aligned and an emergency door hardly looks damaged. After six weeks of 12-hour shifts, the eerie jigsaw puzzle that was TWA 800 was completed for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). This was the largest aircraft reconstruction ever completed.

The crash of the Paris-bound flight just minutes after takeoff from New York's Kennedy International Airport killed 230 people. Studying the reconstructed aircraft helped investigators to narrow the cause of the crash to an explosion over the center fuel tank, not a bomb or missile attack as some initially speculated.

 Please join us for the September dinner meeting as Mr. Kent Sasaki, Branch Manager of Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc. (WJE) will present this fascinating talk. WJE, a nationwide Architectural, Engineering and Materials Science firm, specializes in assessing structural failures and has handled such high-profile collapses as the Kansas City Hyatt Hotel in 1981, the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, and the failure of the Seattle Kingdome ceiling in 1994. Faced with a task the firm had never done before, WJE used its construction experience and innovative approaches to problems to design and fabricate a 110-foot internal spine on which the plane's fuselage could be reconstructed.