Another way the dead can help determine whether a bomb went off is through the numbers and trajectories of the “foreign bodies” embedded within them. These show up on X-rays, which are routinely taken as part of each crash autopsy. Bombs launch shards of themselves and of nearby objects into people seated close by; the patterns within each body and among the bodies overall can shed light on whether a bomb went off and where. If a bomb went off in a starboard bathroom, for instance, the people whose seats faced it would carry fragments that entered the fronts of their bodies. People across the aisle from it would display these injuries on their right sides. As Shanahan had expected, no telltale patterns emerged.
Shanahan turned next to the chemical burns found on some of the bodies.
These burns had begun to fuel speculation that a missile had torn through the cabin. It’s true that chemical burns in a crash are usually caused by contact with highly caustic fuel, but Shanahan suspected that the burns had happened after the plane hit the water. Spilled jet fuel on the surface of the water will burn a floating body on its back, but not on its front. Shanahan checked to be sure that all the “floaters”—people recovered from the water’s surface—were the ones with the chemical burns, and that these burns were on their backs. And they were. Had a missile blasted through the cabin, the fuel burns would have been on people’s fronts or sides, depending on where they had been seated, but not their backs, as the seatbacks would have protected them. No evidence of a missile.
Shanahan also looked at thermal burns, the kind caused by fire. Here there was a pattern. By looking at the orientation of the burns—most were on the front of the body—he was able to trace the path of a fire that had swept through the cabin. Next he looked at data on how badly these passengers’ seats had been burned. That their chairs were far more severely burned than they themselves were told him that people had been thrown from their seats and clear of the plane within seconds after the fire broke out. Authorities had begun to suspect that a wing fuel tank had exploded. The blast was far enough away from passengers that they had remained intact, but serious enough to damage the body of the plane to the point that it broke apart and the passengers were thrown clear.
I ask Shanahan why the bodies would be thrown from the plane if they were wearing seat belts. Once a plane starts breaking up, he replies, enormous forces come into play. Unlike the split-second forces of a bomb, they won’t typically rip a body apart, but they are powerful enough to wrench passengers from their seats. “This is a plane that’s traveling at three hundred miles per hour,” Shanahan says. “When it breaks up, it loses its aerodynamic capability. The engines are still providing thrust, but now the plane’s not stable. It’s going to be going through horrible gyrations. Fractures propagate and within five or six seconds this plane’s in chunks. My theory is that the plane was breaking up pretty rapidly, and seatbacks were collapsing and people were slipping out of their restraint systems.”
The Flight 800 injuries fit Dennis’s theory: People tended to have the sort of massive internal trauma that one typically sees from what they call in Shanahan’s world “extreme water impact.” A falling human stops short when it hits the surface of the water, but its organs keep traveling for a fraction of a second longer, until they hit the wall of the body cavity, which by that point has started to rebound. The aorta often ruptures because part of it is fixed to the body cavity—and thus stops at the same time—while the other part, the part closest to the heart, hangs free and stops slightly later; the two parts wind up traveling in opposite directions and the resultant shear forces cause the vessel to snap. Seventy-three percent of Flight 800’s passengers had serious aortic tears.
The other thing that reliably happens when a body hits water after a long fall is that the ribs break. This fact has been documented by former Civil Aeromedical Institute researchers Richard Snyder and Clyde Snow. In 1968, Snyder looked at autopsy reports from 169 people who had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Eighty-five percent had broken ribs, whereas only 15 percent emerged with fractured vertebrae and only a third with arm or leg fractures. Broken ribs are minor in and of themselves, but during high-velocity impacts they become sharp, jagged weapons that pierce and slice what lies within them: heart, lungs, aorta. In 76 percent of the cases Snyder and Snow looked at, the ribs had punctured the lungs.
Statistics from Flight 800 sketched a similar scenario: Most of the bodies displayed the telltale internal injuries of extreme water impact. All had blunt chest injuries, 99 percent had multiple broken ribs, 88 percent had lacerated lungs, and 73 percent had injured aortas.
If a brutal impact against the water’s surface was what killed most passengers, does that mean they were alive and aware of their circumstances during the three-minute drop to the sea? Alive, perhaps.
“If you define alive as heart pumping and them breathing,” says Shanahan, “there might have been a significant number.” Aware? Dennis doesn’t think so. “I think it’s very remote. The seats and the passengers are being tossed around. You’d just get overwhelmed.” Shanahan has made a point of asking the hundreds of plane and car crash survivors he interviews what they felt and observed during their accident. “I’ve come to the general conclusion that they don’t have a whole lot of awareness that they’ve been severely traumatized. I find them very detached.
They’re aware of a lot of things going on, but they give you this kind of ethereal response—’I knew what was going on, but I didn’t really know what was going on. I didn’t particularly feel like I was a part of it, but on the other hand I knew I was a part of it.’”
Given that so many Flight 800 passengers were thrown clear of the plane as it broke apart, I wondered whether they stood a chance—however slim—of surviving. If you hit the water like an Olympic diver, might it be possible to survive a fall from a high-flying plane? It has happened at least once. In 1963, our man of the long-distance plummet, Richard Snyder, turned his attention to people who had survived falls from normally fatal heights. In “Human Survivability of Extreme Impacts in Free-Fall,” he reports the case of a man who fell seven miles from an airplane and survived, albeit for only half a day. And this poor sap didn’t have the relative luxury of a water landing. He hit ground. (From that height, in fact, there is little difference.) What Snyder found is that a person’s speed at impact doesn’t dependably predict the severity of his or her injuries. He spoke with eloping bridegrooms who sustained more debilitating injuries falling off their ladders than did a suicidal thirty-six-year-old who dropped seventy-one feet onto concrete. The latter walked away needing nothing more than Band-Aids and a therapist.
Generally speaking, people falling from planes have booked their final flight. According to Snyder’s paper, the maximum speed at which a human being has a respectable shot at surviving a feet-first—that’s the safest position—fall into water is about 70 mph. Given that the terminal velocity of a falling body is 120 mph, and that it takes only five hundred feet to reach that speed, you are probably not going to fall five miles from an exploding plane and live to be interviewed by Dennis Shanahan.
Was Shanahan right about Flight 800? He was. Over time, critical pieces of the plane were recovered, and the wreckage supported his findings.
The final determination: Sparks from frayed wiring had ignited fuel vapors, causing an explosion of one of the fuel tanks.
The unjolly science of injury analysis got its start in 1954, the year two British Comet airliners mysteriously dropped from the sky into the sea.
The first plane vanished in January, over Elba, the second off Naples three months later. In both crashes, owing to the depth of the water, authorities were unable to recover much of the wreckage and so turned for clues to the “medical evidence”: the injuries of the twenty-one passengers recovered from the surface of the sea.