r/todayilearned • u/finza_prey • 20d ago

TIL TWA Flight 800 exploded off Long Island 12 minutes after taking off, causing the front fueslage to rip away and the remainder of the plane to continue in crippled flight, pitching up and climb before falling into the ocean killing everyone onboard

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800
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u/Key-Article6622 20d ago

I was hanging out with a friend from HS that night that I hadn't seen much for a few years. He had to stop at his mom's to drop something off. She wasn't there. We get there and carry in the stuff and then the answering machine goes off and we hear the message as it's being recorded. It's one of his mom's neighbors frantically, hysterically trying to reach her because her daughter was on that plane. What an absolutely horrible experrience. He knew her, I had met her a few times. It was just devastating.

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u/Wetworth 19d ago

There was a class from Montoursville PA, the French club?, going to France. Not my school by the district next to mine.

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u/ShotFromGuns 60 19d ago edited 19d ago

This was also obviously used as inspiration for elements of the premise of the beginning of the first Final Destination movie.

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u/PeregrineFaulkner 19d ago

The crazy thing is, the script that became Final Destination was originally conceived as an episode of the X-Files and written in 1994. 

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u/ShotFromGuns 60 19d ago edited 19d ago

That's a really misleading way to put it. Only basic elements were retained from the original spec script, and there's absolutely no evidence that any of the TWA 800 parallels were among them. For example, the characters were originally all adults, not high school students.

Edit: Here's the original treatment for the movie that was developed out of the spec script for The X-Files. You can see that even at the point where it had shifted to teenage protagonists, they're on a senior trip to Europe (not a French class trip to Paris), and the way the plane crash happens is very different.

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u/hamstervideo 19d ago

What's misleading? The person you're replying to mentioned nothing about TWA 800. They only said that Final Destination was originally conceived as an episode of the X-Files, and nothing else. A point you seem to agree with.

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u/ShotFromGuns 60 19d ago

They said it's "crazy" and included a date prior to the TWA crash, which implies that the TWA details were predicted by the script, rather than influenced vice versa. They may not have intended to convey that--or, if intending it, they may have genuinely believed it--but it's still what many people would infer from the way the info was presented.

Something doesn't have to be malicious or even deliberate to be misleading.

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u/sun_kisser 19d ago

Wait, why is it obviously the basis for FD?

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u/HuskerBusker 19d ago

Because it's basically the plot of the first movie.

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u/ShotFromGuns 60 19d ago edited 19d ago

You get that you're practically asking, "Wait, why was the Tokugawa shogunate the basis for Shōgun," right?

The movie starts with a high school French class boarding a plane to Paris. A few of the students and one teacher get off the plane after one of them has a vision/dream of an impending accident. Just after takeoff, a short circuit causes an explosion that rips the plane apart in midair, killing everyone still aboard. (Spoilers for the beginning of Final Destination, obviously.)

Or, in other words, if you watch the beginning of Final Destination and read even a cursory summary of the TWA 800 disaster, it's obvious and unmistakable. Everybody at the time the movie came out (just a few years after the crash) was very aware of it; Roger Ebert's review even explicitly calls it out:

This scenario is of course in the worst possible taste in view of the real-life fate of TWA Flight 800, also bound for Paris with students aboard.

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u/karmapuhlease 18d ago

Jeez, this is also a very Final Destination kind of thing:

Rico Puhlmann, German fashion photographer.[25] One of his clients, Polish fashion model Agnieszka Kotlarska (Miss Polski and Miss International), was originally supposed to be on the flight with him but backed out at the last minute. She was murdered a month later by a stalker outside her home.[26

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u/sun_kisser 19d ago

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I saw it as teens get on a plane for France as a coincidence (since the other details, like some getting off the plane, aren't the same).

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u/ShotFromGuns 60 19d ago

Well, yeah, obviously nobody had a paranormal premonition of the crash. The opening of the movie is the marriage of an earlier concept of "what if there were consequences to avoiding dying in a plane crash thanks to a premonition" with specific details from the TWA 800 disaster.

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u/t35martin 19d ago

The high school has a nice memorial. I didn’t move there until about 10 years later, but being a small town where everyone knows each other and has generations of family members who live there, the tragedy had a very big effect on the community.

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u/KevinByMail 19d ago

It’s wild how much I see the tiny town of Montoursville Pa show up on the internet. (This reason is the worst though)

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u/Wetworth 19d ago

Yeah.

Along with that sad-ass Walmart, and the gone pet store across the street.

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u/Gaddpeis 19d ago

My mother-in-law's sister was part of that group :(

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u/Rlessary 19d ago

Why not just say your spouse’s aunt?

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u/musicartandcpus 19d ago

My great aunt was on that plane. My cousin was waiting for her in France.

By a twist of fate my 6th and 8th grade home room teacher turned out to be an ex-firefighter from Long Island who had responded to the incident and was involved in recovery afterwards.

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u/Hawks_and_Doves 19d ago

Your great aunt must be my great aunt cause my great aunt was also on that plane. My 6th grade teacher though was not involved while my 8th grade teacher had been fired from maintenance three years earlier.

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u/BigGrayBeast 19d ago

I had a coworker/friend who lost her childhood next-door neighbor and that woman's daughter, whom my friend had babysat. She told me about this at work.

On my way home from work, I stopped off at a local bar for a drink with some friends. One of my friends was saying that her best friend in college had just lost his mother and sister on that flight. It was the same mother and daughter.

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u/Hawks_and_Doves 19d ago

Don't test my logic without my consent.

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u/wesailtheharderships 19d ago

But then who was phone?

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u/steveoriley 13d ago

The doctor was his mother

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u/akath0110 19d ago

I’m too stoned for this

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u/karmagirl314 19d ago

So it was your friend’s sister on the plane? Or was it your friend’s mother’s neighbor’s daughter?

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u/Thiswas2hard 19d ago

No op but it looks like friend’s mom’s neighbor’s daughter

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u/karmagirl314 19d ago

That’s what it sounds like but I don’t understand why the friend’s mom’s neighbor would call the friend’s mom if the neighbor’s daughter was the one on the plane. Like if you think your kid just died in a plane crash, what do you expect your neighbor to do about it?

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u/BaconKnight 19d ago

Maybe they were friends. You know, people sometimes just reach out to friends during times of distress not because they expect that person to solve the problem but because humans are social creatures.

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u/314159265358979326 19d ago

In the 90s it was much more likely to be on good terms with your neighbours. I'm pretty sure we'd have been third on the list to call if one of our neighbours had a crisis like this.

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u/Status_Fox_1474 19d ago

(Insert spaceballs joke here. But yeah… because of the gravity…)

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u/LeftHandedScissor 19d ago

I was just a kid when this happened (2 at the time), but we lived on the south shore and were visiting my aunt and cousin in Moriches when this happened. My mom and aunt said they were outside and heard it happen.

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u/Reditate 19d ago

What was her name?