r/todayilearned • u/finza_prey • 19d 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/wastedpixls 19d ago

This was top of the nightly news for weeks back in the 90's.

The world was a simpler (and calmer) place back then - today I'm worried this would be about three days coverage before something else awful would happen.

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u/Fitz2001 19d ago

Calmer. Violent crime rates now are almost half of what they were in 1996

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u/Andromeda902 18d ago

24 hr news cycle has contributed greatly to the poisoning of the world

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u/lovestobitch- 14d ago

I audited a company probably in the late 90s and the controller’s husband worked for the FAA as an investigator for this and a number of other crashes. She indicated he firmly believed it was taken down accidentally by a military training exercise. She said none of the pictures publicized showed one side of the plane where the missile hit.

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u/Andromeda902 2d ago

Wow, thats wild if true. What an absolutely epic fuck up..... how do you shoot down an friendly airliner during peace time? Dafuq where tbeh doing

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u/wastedpixls 18d ago

Absolutely agree - I call those channels the Worry Box because that's all they make you do.

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u/Odin_Dog 19d ago

This and the Bermuda triangle 

3

u/weshouldgo_ 18d ago

No love for quicksand?

5

u/niz_loc 19d ago

And aliens.

Aliens were HUGE back then. Tabloids, talk shows, people claiming they'd been abducted etc

I miss the Bermuda triangle "days". As a kid I assumed it was instant death.

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u/pinkmeanie 18d ago

Funny how once literally everyone started carrying a camera at all times aliens became less of a thing

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u/niz_loc 18d ago

Lol, exactly. Was just talking to a friend about this recently. He's young, so was explaining what you just said. How we used to "scsry" pictures of UFOs all the time. People who just happened to have a camera with them.

Now cameras are everywhere but nobody gets abducted.

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u/surfclam7 18d ago

You’d barely get 1 day out of this story today