Trevor Collins

I don't know if it's better or worse that you understand that I've designed parts that fly today.

Certainly.

And so really, you know, this is a very tragic case.

There is no getting around that.

And it is something that happened.

So like facts are facts.

But at the end of the day, you know, there is a cold comfort in the fact that we learned so much from this incident.

And we'll talk about those things later.

but anyway we're in the kind of pre-departure stage there's a minor delay but after a few minutes uh the plane begins taxiing and it's an otherwise uneventful takeoff it takes off at 8 19 p.m so not too much of a delay but again remember that they were sitting on the ground for a little bit here with the passengers on board

And then, 12 minutes after takeoff, at 8.31pm, TWA Flight 800 exploded and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near East Mauritius, New York, just off the coast of Long Island.

How many minutes after takeoff?

Just 12 short minutes.

I mean, they had only made it 54 miles or about 87 kilometers, if you prefer.

And in fact, I do have an image for you, Fredo, here of the flight path.

This comes from this day in aviation dot com, but it shows the path the plane flew.

And you can see if you look a little closely, there's a red, a green and a yellow box.

We'll talk about those boxes later.

But those are essentially the wreckage zones where the plane came down in pieces.

Right.

So this is where it crash-landed and, you know, I should say, tragically, you know, there was 212 passengers and 18 crew members.