TWA search turns up large object; Rough waters hampers effort;

By Matthew Brelis, Globe Staff and Pamela Ferdinand, Globe Correspondent

EAST MORICHES, N.Y.

Sonar equipment detected a long trail of debris and a 15-foot high object on the ocean floor that may be the biggest single piece of the TWA 747 jet that exploded Wednesday night, but investigators were unable to determine what it was because a sonar buoy was damaged.

The buoy hit the object and was damaged while being towed, marking a frustrating end to a day in which investigators, buffeted by strong winds and swayed by 7-foot swells, were neither able to recover any significant new parts of the plane nor locate the flight recorders.

The search for conclusive evidence of a bombing or a mechanical failure continued for a third full day, and investigators expressed hope that large parts of the plane, the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder will provide critical clues.

Sonar mapping of the ocean floor miles off Long Island uncovered a trail of debris, less than a mile long, "culminating with a large piece of something," said Robert Francis, vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.

The sonar buoy was caught in the "big substance on the bottom" and was damaged, Francis said.

Officials would not speculate on what the large mass is, but hope to send a video camera down today. If it is a large portion of the fuselage, they will then send Navy divers down, said Francis and James Kallstrom, the leader of the FBI antiterrorism task force in New York.

"We want the fuselage, we want the rest of the airplane and a higher priority is we want the bodies," Kallstrom said. "I suspect they are all together, but I am just guessing that. We want the metal so we can look at it forensically."

Francis denied that sonar equipment had detected a ping that might indicate the location of the plane's black boxes. Kallstrom earlier said a ping had been heard but later said he was mistaken.

Earlier in the day, sources in Washington said pings had been heard.

President Clinton, in his weekly radio address yesterday, vowed, "We are doing all we can to find the cause of this disaster, and we will find what caused it."

For the first time, some relatives of the 230 victims toured the crash scene yesterday. A videotape was made to play for the 155 families sequestered at the Ramada Inn near John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, where the Paris-bound flight had departed.

After touring the scene in a Port Authority helicopter, three family members of victims from Pennsylvania, France and Italy were taken to the Coast Guard station in East Moriches for a briefing by officials, including Kallstrom.

Grief is giving way to frustration among the relatives, who asked about the search, whether more could be done and the time frame of the investigation, Gov. George Pataki of New York said.

"For most, the clear priority is to have their loved ones identified. . . . For others, it's finding out what happened," he said.

"We are racing against an emotional clock of the poor victims," said Kallstrom, tears welling in his eyes. The FBI agent had spent more than an hour with relatives of victims yesterday and was emotionally drained by the experience.

"It puts the true scope of the breadth of this tragedy in focus seeing the emotions they are going through," he said. "A number of them told me they weren't interested in who did this. They want the bodies back."

Kallstrom said he lost a friend of 25 years, a member of the flight crew whom he would not identify.

By yesterday afternoon, only two of the 100 recovered bodies had been released to families, who have been frustrated by delays in the investigation and in identifying the victims.

Meanwhile, Ths Sunday Times of London reported that Israel had secretly warned US intelligence that an American aircraft could be sabotaged or hijacked by Islamic extremists before the TWA jumbo jet exploded.

TWA apparently received no warning from the US government about a terrorist threat, the paper said. The plane had flown from Athens to New York, and was on the ground for three hours being cleaned and serviced before it took off for Paris.

Federal investigators hope the plane's flight data recorder will reveal whether the 25-year-old 747 was downed by a bomb.

In a commercial airliner, the fuselage is pressurized except for a portion of the nose and the tail.

"There is nothing within the pressure vessel that is put there by Boeing or TWA that is capable of blowing up," an aviation source familiar with the investigation said. "In past bombing incidents, the flight data recorder has captured an overpressure reading that we know is consistent with an explosive device. If that is there, it would be one way to tell it was not mechanical."

Another source close to the investigation said a pressure spike "could be there only for an instant, because depending on the explosion, all power would be lost and the thing would go dead."

Several sources involved in the investigation predicted that recovery of the engines, the recorders and other critical parts of the plane would be successful.

"It's just very slow going right now with a small-craft warning blowing. And until we get more evidence, everyone is mumbling that 'it could be this; it could be that.' " the aviation source familiar with the investigation said.

The cockpit voice recorder, a looped tape that recorded all cockpit conversations before Flight 800 took off at 8:21 p.m. until the crash at 8:40 may also have captured the sound of an explosion, a source said.

At the same time, officials are growing skeptical of the theory that the 747 may have been downed by a land-based heat-seeking missile fired from a shoulder launcher. "The missile explanation seems virtually impossible from land," the official said. "But we haven't ruled out the possibility it may have been fired from the water."

Officials, however, are wary of the water-based missile theory partly because they believe some of the many witnesses who watched the plane explode and fall from the sky would have seen or heard a missile launched from the water and soar through the night sky.

Coast Guard officials said winds gusting to 40 m.p.h. had driven debris from the wreckage east, and the search area was expanded to 500 square miles from 240 square miles.

Pataki said yesterday he had called in the National Guard to patrol the beaches of the Hamptons, where parts of the wreckage - ranging from seats to a six-foot section of wing - had started washing ashore.

The governor also said additional pathologists were brought in from New York and New Jersey to help the Suffolk County Medical Examiner's office identify bodies.

Last night, about two dozen friends and relatives of those who were killed held a news conference and harshly criticized Suffolk County Medical Examiner Charles V. Wetli for his handling of the identification process.

"I'm calling upon the governor to call a state of emergency to remove the medical examiner," said state Supreme Court judge Michael Pesce, the chief administrative judge for Brooklyn and Staten Island, whose fiancee, Bonnie Walters, a Manhattan bond trader, died on the flight.

At his own news conference yesterday, Wetli said none of the bodies had tell-tale signs of a bombing, but sources familiar with the investigation said that was not surprising given the size of the jet.

At a news conference to show their support for relatives of those on board, TWA employees yesterday sharply criticized New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for his harsh remarks toward TWA managers about how they treated relatives of the victims.

"I would like to make a personal statement to Mayor Giuliani," said Sherry Cooper, president of the TWA flight attendants union. "Now is not the time to make this tragedy a personal agenda or a political career," she said.

She said that more than 50 TWA employees were on the flight, including 28 flight attendants.