TWA Flight 800 - International Memorial

International Memorial

The TWA Flight 800 International Memorial was dedicated in a 2-acre (8,100 m2) parcel immediately adjoining the main pavilion at Smith Point County Park in Shirley, New York, on July 14, 2004. Funds for the memorial were raised by the Families of TWA Flight 800 Association. David Busch of Busch Associates PC Bay Shore, New York designed the memorial. The memorial includes landscaped grounds, flags from the 13 countries of the victims, and a curved black granite memorial with the names engraved on one side and an illustration on the other of a wave releasing 230 seagulls into the sky. In July 2006 an abstract design of a 10-foot (3.0 m) high lighthouse in black granite designed by Harry Edward Seaman, who had lost his cousin in the crash, was added. The lighthouse sits above a tomb holding many of the victims' personal belongings.

The wreckage is now permanently stored in an NTSB facility in Ashburn, Loudoun County, Virginia that was custom built for the purpose. The reconstructed aircraft is used to train accident investigators. On July 17, 2008 the Secretary of Transportation visited the facility and announced a final rule designed to prevent more accidents caused by explosions in fuel tanks. The NTSB first recommended such a rule just five months after the Flight 800 accident and thirty-three years after a similar recommendation issued by the Civil Aeronautics Board Bureau of Safety on December 17, 1963, nine days after the crash of Pan Am Flight 214. In 2009 Boeing advised the FAA that its new Boeing 787 Dreamliner could not meet the new safety standards. The FAA proposed to relax the safeguards for preventing sparks inside the fuel tank, calling them "impractical."