Bombing of TWA plane at McCarran led to new security

Wednesday, March 9, 2005 | 8:43 a.m.

After Trans World Airlines Flight 57 landed and the cockpit of the empty Boeing 707 exploded on McCarran International Airport's tarmac on March 8, 1972, officials applied what they learned to prevent repeat incidents, one historian says.

"We remember such incidents because they are so unusual -- the first and only time a bomb in a plane exploded at McCarran," Mark Hall-Parton, administrator of the Howard W. Cannon Aviation Museum at McCarran, said Tuesday on the 33rd anniversary of the incident.

"We have our enemies out there and, if they have tried to do it again, they haven't succeeded. You never say something is never going to happen again, but today we do not have bombs going off in planes at U.S. airports."

Hall-Patton said nearly every time an incident has happened in aviation history officials have learned something and have applied that newfound knowledge to safety and security procedures to try to prevent repeat occurrences.

But that, he said, does not prevent new things from happening such as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks; TWA Flight 800 mysteriously crashing south of New York's Long Island in 1996; or Pan Am Flight 103 exploding over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

"Is there any way to plan for everything that can possibly happen? No," Hall-Patton said. "And when something else happens, it does not take away from what we previously had learned. It just gives us something else to learn about and prevent. We are human. We can learn. That's what we have going for us.

"Procedures for searching planes were improved by what was learned from the TWA (Flight 57) incident."

Clark County Emergency Manager Jim O'Brien agrees with Hall-Patton's assessment.

"The question mark is that you have people involved," O'Brien said. "At one point, no one thought people would fly airplanes into buildings.

"Certainly we need to be prepared to prevent major incidents by learning from things that happened. But we also should try to better prepare for life's little emergencies so we will be better prepared for the larger incidents."

TWA Flight 57, nonstop from New York's Kennedy International Airport, was searched both before it took off and after it landed with its 10 passengers because a bomb threat had been made by an extortionist and because a six-pound bomb had been found that day on another TWA jet.

Hall-Patton said that while the bomb that was planted in the rear section of the cockpit of the Las Vegas-bound plane was not found, airport officials and local police had the wherewithal to move the jet away from the terminal so that if there indeed was a bomb on board and it went off no one would be hurt.

There were no injuries from the explosion. Whoever placed the bomb on the plane was never arrested for it, Hall-Patton said.

TWA never paid the extortion demands and, despite two more threats that April, no more bombs were found on its planes. Threats against the airline ceased.