February 25, 2021
Twenty-five years ago, a Boeing 747 flying from New York City to Paris exploded in midair and broke apart just off the coast of Long Island. All 230 people on board the plane, Trans World Airlines Flight 800, were killed, and the wreckage plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean.
In the lengthy investigation that followed, the National Transportation Safety Board had workers salvage the remains from the ocean floor and painstakingly reconstruct the plane. When they finished, the reconstruction was moved to a warehouse in Virginia, where it has been used to train plane crash investigators for nearly two decades.
But with the lease on the warehouse nearing its end, the agency announced plans Monday to decommission and destroy the remaining wreckage from one of the deadliest plane crashes in U.S. history.