25-year anniversary of TWA Flight 800 explosion marks new chapter in disaster's history

A private memorial service for the families of the victims of the 1996 TWA Flight 800 explosion is being held on Saturday, 25 years after the disaster that killed 230 people and just before the federal government begins destroying the reconstructed wreckage of the ill-fated aircraft.

The service will take place on Long Island, New York, more than 260 miles from the 30,000-square-foot hangar at the National Transportation Safety Board's training center in Ashburn, Virginia, where the reconstructed Boeing 747 wreckage has been for more than two decades. The agency, which had until last week been using the salvaged wreckage in accident investigation training courses, is set to decommission and destroy it in the coming months. "It's been very useful, but I think we've gotten to the point now that it's time to move on from that, but in a different way," Frank Hilldrup, an NTSB official who was on the original team of Flight 800 investigators, told CNN.