THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 19, 1996 TAG: 9610190286
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
LENGTH: 37 lines
In a sign that the recovery operation for TWA Flight 800 is winding down, Navy officials Friday ordered the amphibious transport dock Trenton back to its homeport in Norfolk.
The 570-foot ship had served for months as a floating headquarters for the salvage operation and also housed smaller boats that were used to transport large pieces of debris to shore.
Investigators said Friday that Navy salvage workers, in a final side-scan sonar sweep of 23 square miles of sea bed earlier this week, located 200 more targets on the ocean floor that could contain wreckage from the flight.
The news bolstered investigators' hopes that the unrecovered debris might help them finally determine whether an explosive charge or mechanical failure caused the plane to crash, senior investigators said.
``We see this as very good news because the more wreckage we can obtain, the better chance that we can find the evidence that everyone is looking for,'' said James K. Kallstrom, the assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The Paris-bound plane exploded off the coast of southeastern Long Island on July 17, killing all 230 people aboard. For nearly 100 days, the cause of the crash has eluded a team made up of hundreds of investigators from several federal agencies, including the National Transportation Safety Board and the FBI.
For three months, the Navy has found and mapped the location of more than 4,000 debris targets, but divers later discovered that hundreds of the sites were ``false hits,'' such as clam beds or metal that did not belong to the plane.
Investigators still have not decided if they will attempt cruder search methods such as dredging or siphoning the sand on the ocean floor. by CNB