Thirty years after the crash of TWA Flight 800, author and veteran journalist Steve Wick reflects on the night that forever changed Long Island. Then a Newsday editor, Wick made it out to the crash site in the Atlantic Ocean within hours of the disaster and witnessed firsthand the haunting aftermath of one of the deadliest aviation tragedies in American history. In this personal essay for the Sun, he recounts what he saw that night, the enduring questions surrounding the tragedy, and why, three decades later, the focus should remain on the 230 lives that were lost.

The evening of July 17, 1996, was, in so many ways, a classic summer moment in time on Long Island. The sky was clear, the air warm, the Great South Bay and the Atlantic Ocean remarkably calm. Pleasure and fishing boats dotted the bays, from the west end of Long Island to the East End. The beaches along the South Shore were full.

I left the Newsday newsroom at about 8 p.m. that night, heading east to my home in Cutchogue. I passed over the William Floyd Parkway at about 8:30. I pulled into my driveway about a half hour later, and as I did, my daughter ran out to tell me a passenger jet had crashed in the ocean and to call the newsroom.

I spoke to an editor, who said reports indicated a TWA passenger jet had exploded over the ocean, somewhere south of Moriches Inlet. The editor told me another reporter knew of a fisherman who kept his boat at a marina in Hampton Bays.

Go there, and find this boat, the editor said. Get the fisherman to take you out on the ocean. John Williams will join you there.

John was then – and is now – one of the most talented photographers at the paper. I was anxious to meet him at the marina, with the goal of asking the fisherman to gas up his boat and take us out to the crash site.

We both arrived as almost the same time. We boarded the boat, and headed east and south, into the descending darkness. Luckily, the sea was absolutely flat, as calm as I’ve seen it. I get sea sick; this was a great gift.

As we motored out into the ocean, in the distance, we could see bright light hugging the edge of the horizon – burning jet fuel from TWA Flight 800, which had left JFK Airport at 8:02 pm., almost an hour after its scheduled departure time, had set the sea ablaze.

The ocean was burning. As we got closer to the fire we moved into a thick cloud of black smoke blowing directly at us from the southwest. It was a sickening smell, and it affected both John and me.

John did everything to ward off the nausea and focus on getting his equipment ready. His professionalism, his humanity, was on full display and is one of the many reasons for his talent. Soon, it must have been nearly midnight, we arrived at the crash site. Even though it was dark, we could see stomach-turning mounds of wreckage floating on the surface.

The first thing I saw was an empty baby bottle. It floated by the stern of the boat. We were both seeing something truly nightmarish; John wanted to get every shot he could, and make it the best he could under the conditions. I thought of the many airline trips with my own kids when they were young and giving a baby a bottle at takeoff can help ease the changing air pressure.

But it was a baby bottle. While we passed through the debris at the crash site – shocking piles of personal luggage, torn apart seats, seat cushions, large and small sections of the air craft – we were also coming to grips with the enormous human cost of this disaster. Flight 800 was headed to Rome, via Paris. It was mid-summer. Families were going on vacation; school age children were headed abroad, giddy with excitement.

It wasn’t difficult to picture a happy scene aboard as the jet rose to its cruising altitude. Refreshments would soon be served. Excitement among the passengers to be flying to Europe would have been high. The baby bottle put the human cost in stark relief.

In spite of the darkness, we could see dozens of fishing and pleasure boats, their onboard lights glowing, pulling objects from the sea onto their transoms. Both John and I knew what we were looking at.

Remembering this night, now 30 years ago, I don’t remember exactly how I communicated with the newsroom back in Melville. I can’t remember if John had some sort of radio hookup or what I used, but I phoned in a story to a reporter, who took it down. It appeared in the next morning’s newspaper, and was one of the reasons why Newsday won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for its coverage.

The Boeing 747 had exploded at 8:31 p.m., with 230 human beings aboard, just as I was passing over William Floyd Parkway, to the north of the crash site. Hundreds of witnesses on land, some as far away as Wading River, and on boats saw the explosion.  

The pilot of a nearby passenger plane called the control tower to say he saw “an explosion out here.” Many witnesses, on land and on sea, heard the explosion and saw fireballs in the sky falling towards the ocean. More than two dozen witnesses told investigators they were sure they saw a “streak of light” coming up from the ocean towards Flight 800 – meaning a missile.

Passenger jets don’t explode like this, and all focus that first night and into the coming days was that terrorism was surely involved. Thirty years have passed, and the speculation – and theories – of what brought the jet down have only grown. To many, there will never be a satisfactory explanation for a passenger jet exploding the way Flight 800 did.

The official finding by the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that volatile fuel vapors in the center fuel tank had exploded, breaking the jet into pieces. A visual recreation of the disaster by the Central Intelligence Agency concluded that the “streaks of light” seen by so many people were columns of burning jet fuel, not a sea or land-launched missile.

What should be remembered after 30 years is the loss of human life, and the unimaginable grief felt by the families of the dead. They are what matters now.