Bound for Paris from JFK International Airport on July 17, 1996, Flight 800 blew apart in the air over the Atlantic off East Moriches, New York.
Witness reports were contradictory. Some claimed to have seen a missile strike the aircraft. Traces of explosives had turned up in the recovered wreckage, but no trace of bomb hardware had been found. (Later it would come out that the explosive materials had been planted in the plane long before the crash, as part of a sniffer-dog training exercise.) Conspiracy theories sprouted and spread. The investigation dragged on without a definitive answer to the question on everyone’s mind: What—or who—had brought Flight 800 down from the sky?
Within days of the crash, Shanahan flew to New York to visit the bodies of the dead and see what they had to say. Last spring, I flew to Carlsbad, California, to visit Shanahan. I wanted to know how—scientifically and emotionally—a person does this job.
I had other questions for him too. Shanahan is a man who knows the reality behind the nightmare. He knows, in grim medical detail, exactly what happens to people in different types of crashes. He knows how they typically die, whether they’re likely to have been cognizant of what was happening, and how—in a low-altitude crash, anyway—they might have increased their chances of survival. I told him I would only take up an hour of his time, but stayed for five.
A crashed plane will usually tell its own story. Sometimes literally, in the voices on the cockpit flight recorder; sometimes by implication, in the rendings and charrings of the fallen craft. But when a plane goes down over the ocean, its story may be patchy and incoherent. If the water is especially deep or the currents swift and chaotic, the black box may not be recovered, nor may enough of the sunken wreckage be recovered to determine for sure what occurred in the plane’s last minutes. When this happens, investigators turn to what is known in aviation pathology textbooks as “the human wreckage”: the bodies of passengers. For unlike a wing or a piece of fuselage, a corpse will float to the water’s surface. By studying victims’ wounds—the type, the severity, which side of the body they’re on—an injury analyst can begin to piece together the horrible unfolding of events.
Shanahan is waiting for me when I arrive at the airport. He is wearing Dockers, a short-sleeved shirt, and aviator-frame glasses. His hair lies neatly on either side of a perfectly straight part. It could almost be a toupee, but isn’t. He is polite, composed, and immediately likable. He reminds me of my pharmacist Mike.
He isn’t at all what I’d had in mind. I had imagined someone gruff, morgue-hardened, prone to expletives. I had planned to do my interview in the field, in the aftermath of a crash. I pictured the two of us in a makeshift morgue in some small-town dance hall or high-school gym, he in his stained lab coat, me with my notepad. This was before I realized that Shanahan himself does not do the autopsies for the crashes he investigates. These are done by teams of medical examiners from nearby county morgues. Though he goes to the site and will often examine bodies for one reason or another, Shanahan works mostly with the autopsy reports, correlating these with the flight’s seating chart to identify clusters of telltale injuries. He explained that visiting him at work on a crash site might have required a wait of several years, for the cause of most crashes isn’t a mystery, and thus input from the cadavers isn’t often called for.
When I tell him I was disappointed over not being able to report from the scene of a crash, Shanahan hands me a book called Aerospace Pathology, which, he assures me, contains photographs of the sorts of things I might have seen. I open the volume to a section on “body plotting.” Among line sketches of downed plane pieces, small black dots are scattered. Leader lines spoke away from the dots to their labels: “brown leather shoes,” “copilot,” “piece of spine,” “stewardess.” By the time I get to the chapter that describes Shanahan’s work—“Patterns of Injury in Fatal Aircraft Accidents,” wherein photo captions remind investigators to keep in mind things like “intense heat may produce intracranial steam resulting in blowout of the cranial vault, simulating injuries from impact”—it has become clear to me that labeled black dots are as up-close-and-personal as I wish to get to the human wreckage of a plane crash.
In the case of TWA Flight 800, Shanahan was on the trail of a bomb. He was analyzing the victims’ injuries for evidence of an explosion in the cabin. If he found it, he would then try to pinpoint where on the plane the bomb had been. He takes a thick folder from a file cabinet drawer and pulls out his team’s report. Here is the chaos and gore of a major passenger airline crash quantified and outlined, with figures and charts and bar graphs, transformed from horror into something that can be discussed over coffee in a National Transportation Safety Board morning meeting. “4.19: Injury Predominance Right vs. Left with Floating Victims,” “4.28: Mid-Shaft Femur Fractures and Forward Horizontal Seat Frame Damage.” I ask Shanahan whether the statistics and the dispassionate prose helped him maintain what I imagine to be a necessary emotional remove from the human tragedy behind the inquiry. He looks down at his hands, which rest, fingers interlinked, on the Flight 800 folder.
“Maureen will tell you I coped variably with Flight 800. It was emotionally very traumatic, particularly with the number of teenagers on board. A high school French club going to Paris. Young couples. We were all pretty grim.” Shanahan says this isn’t typical of the mood behind the scenes at a crash site. “You want a very superficial involvement, so jokes and lightheartedness tend to be fairly common. Not this time.”
For Shanahan, the hardest thing about Flight 800 was that most of the bodies were relatively whole. “Intactness bothers me much more than the lack of it,” he says. The sorts of things most of us can’t imagine seeing or coping with—severed hands, legs, scraps of flesh—Shanahan is more comfortable with. “That way, it’s just tissue. You can put yourself in that frame of mind and get on with your job.” It’s gory, but not sad. Gore you get used to. Shattered lives you don’t. Shanahan does what the pathologists do. “They focus on the parts, not the person. During the autopsy, they’ll be describing the eyes, then the mouth. You don’t stand back and say, ‘This is a person who is the father of four.’ It’s the only way you can emotionally survive.”
Ironically, intactness is one of the most useful clues in determining whether a bomb has gone off. We are on page 16 of the report, Heading 4.7: Body Fragmentation. “People very close to an explosion come apart,” Shanahan says to me quietly. Dennis has a way of talking about these things that seems neither patronizingly euphemistic nor offensively graphic. Had there been a bomb in the cabin of Flight 800, Shanahan would have found a cluster of “highly fragmented bodies” corresponding to the seats nearest the explosion. In fact, most of the bodies were primarily intact, a fact quickly gleaned by noting their body fragmentation code. To simplify the work of people like Shanahan who must analyze large numbers of reports, medical examiners often use color codes. On Flight 800, for instance, people ended up either Green (body intact), Yellow (crushed head or the loss of one extremity), Blue (loss of 2 extremities with or without crushed head), or Red (loss of 3 or more extremities or complete transection of body).