New TWA Flight 800 film coming out

[Axxman300]

The blast came from inside the fuel tank.

What's in an "empty" fuel tank? Fuel residue. I'm way outside my knowledge base here, but I suspect this residue can be everything from puddles of jet fuel collected in places, to a thin sheen, or film on the interior walls.

Next, you have a plane sitting on a hot tarmac with its air-conditioning running, and while this happens daily all over the world without incident, in this case there were cracked and or damaged/exposed wires in the center fuel tank. The plane takes off. Engines are doing their thing, which means there is serious vibration in parts of the airframe. The passengers never feel it, but in the lower decks, and certainly in the fuel tanks in the wings and center the vibration tangible. Again, not a big deal. Right now there are thousands of jetliners in the skies with happily vibrating airframes and they'll all land safely, and fly somewhere else.

But inside TWA-800's tank the vibrations help to create a static charge. Again, drawing from 6th and 7th grade science classes, when you get a bunch molecules together and vibrate them at just the right speed, or frequency, they will create their own electrical charges, one positive and one negative. On any other aircraft that day this wouldn't have been a problem, but 800 had damaged wiring with its own electrical charge passing though. While a 747 can survive a lighting strike, it wasn't designed to dissipate, or channel a static discharge from within its fuel system as those excited fuel molecules and bare wires decided to kiss.

Again, I'm obviously out of my depth here, but I know explosives well enough to know they were not a factor in TWA-800's crash.

[grmcdorman]

While I'm not an engineer, it is my understanding that partially or fully empty tanks are actually worse than full - because you get a fuel-air mix. A full tank doesn't have much air, i.e. oxidizer, that you need for it to burn. An empty, or mostly empty, can have a perfect fuel/air mix for an explosion.

[Trebuchet]

Originally Posted by Axxman300

The blast came from inside the fuel tank.

What's in an "empty" fuel tank? Fuel residue. I'm way outside my knowledge base here, but I suspect this residue can be everything from puddles of jet fuel collected in places, to a thin sheen, or film on the interior walls.

Next, you have a plane sitting on a hot tarmac with its air-conditioning running, and while this happens daily all over the world without incident, in this case there were cracked and or damaged/exposed wires in the center fuel tank. The plane takes off. Engines are doing their thing, which means there is serious vibration in parts of the airframe. The passengers never feel it, but in the lower decks, and certainly in the fuel tanks in the wings and center the vibration tangible. Again, not a big deal. Right now there are thousands of jetliners in the skies with happily vibrating airframes and they'll all land safely, and fly somewhere else.

But inside TWA-800's tank the vibrations help to create a static charge. Again, drawing from 6th and 7th grade science classes, when you get a bunch molecules together and vibrate them at just the right speed, or frequency, they will create their own electrical charges, one positive and one negative. On any other aircraft that day this wouldn't have been a problem, but 800 had damaged wiring with its own electrical charge passing though. While a 747 can survive a lighting strike, it wasn't designed to dissipate, or channel a static discharge from within its fuel system as those excited fuel molecules and bare wires decided to kiss.

Again, I'm obviously out of my depth here, but I know explosives well enough to know they were not a factor in TWA-800's crash.

Originally Posted by grmcdorman

While I'm not an engineer, it is my understanding that partially or fully empty tanks are actually worse than full - because you get a fuel-air mix. A full tank doesn't have much air, i.e. oxidizer, that you need for it to burn. An empty, or mostly empty, can have a perfect fuel/air mix for an explosion.

Exactly that. Boeing spent a great deal of money improving the design, a process in which I was peripherally involved because it required making changes on the rear spar of the center section, a location which also holds a lot of flight control mechanisms I was responsible for. In a addition to improving the wiring, tank inerting systems were developed.
If the manufacturer didn't accept that a center fuel tank explosion was the cause of the accident, why were they willing to spend all that money?

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by grmcdorman

While I'm not an engineer, it is my understanding that partially or fully empty tanks are actually worse than full - because you get a fuel-air mix. A full tank doesn't have much air, i.e. oxidizer, that you need for it to burn. An empty, or mostly empty, can have a perfect fuel/air mix for an explosion.

Yes, that's the high-altitude view of it (pun intended). But conditions have to be right, and there are several variables at work. A high-altitude explanation is that aircraft engineering focuses carefully on controlling the variables and not letting the conditions arise. The conspiracy theorists say that the investigation didn't prove to their satisfaction that the conditions arose in TWA 800, so we have to look to other causes. The sinister portion of the conspiracy theory is the desire to cover up a "buddy spike" scenario by pushing the faulty wiring theory despite a supposed lack of evidence for it, and by emphasizing anomalies they say are more consistent with their view.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by Trebuchet

Exactly that. Boeing spent a great deal of money improving the design, a process in which I was peripherally involved because it required making changes on the rear spar of the center section, a location which also holds a lot of flight control mechanisms I was responsible for. In an addition to improving the wiring, tank inerting systems were developed.

I participated later in similar redesign validations for the 777. I should point out that prior to this investigation and before Stalcup was playing with his crystals, I was heavily involved in my PhD work which included redesigning the optomechanical assemblies for air-intercept missiles and developing accuracy models that would prove their greater effectiveness.

[mikegriffith1]

Deleted due to formatting issues with using Quick Reply.

[mikegriffith1]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1:

-- The front landing gear, even though it was in its housing when the plane exploded, suffered severe concussive damage. This is revealing and crucial because the landing gear is made of steel and titanium and is one of the strongest, toughest parts of the airliner. It could not have been damaged so severely merely from the impact of landing on the water. Someone inside the investigation leaked to the New York Times that the bomb experts concluded that the damage to the landing gear indicated the gear had been “very close to the source of the explosion.” The landing gear, of course, was well forward of the center fuel tank.

Originally Posted by Axxman300:

Cool, "Some Guy" leaked info before the investigation was done. Here's the problem: the main forward landing gear doors (port and starboard) were not bent, only the rear door which attaches to the gear. And the cargo container from the nose section showed no damage from an explosion, which would have obvious. That's why only fools believe initial results.

None of this addresses the concussive damage to the front landing gear, which was the subject of the paragraph that you were ostensibly answering. That damage could not have been done by a low-order explosion of the center fuel tank nor by the force of the impact on the ocean.

We’ll get to the issue of the doors in a moment, but the damage to the nose landing gear deserves further comment.

Although I generically said “someone” leaked the information on the landing gear, the information came from multiple people involved with the NTSB investigation, and this information was discussed by several news outlets at the time. I quote from a story published in the Baltimore Sun on July 31, 1996:

The front landing gear of the Boeing 747 that crashed off the coast here July 17 shows damage from a powerful blast inside the plane, the first clear physical evidence that the plane was brought down by a bomb, federal investigators said last night.

The landing gear would have been retracted into its housing inside the fuselage long before the plane exploded, and the hydraulic mechanism that retracts it was found to have "serious concussive damage," a federal investigator said. "By the way it had been smashed, the bomb experts thought it had been very close to the source of the explosion”. . . .

Samples of apparent residue found on the landing gear have been sent to the FBI lab in Washington to see if they hold chemical traces of an explosive.

One investigator who saw the hydraulic unit described the damage as "more like a crack than a tear."

"The vast majority of the wreckage has been these torn, mangled pieces of thin metal, from the fuselage," he said. "This was a huge piece of thick steel, and it had been blasted, is the only way to describe it." (https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs...067-story.html)

This was at the time when the FBI appeared ready to go with, or at least reluctantly accept, the bomb explanation, since the missile explanation was summarily and prematurely rejected by key officials within days after the crash, if not hours.

Anyway, how in the world could a low-order explosion in the center fuel tank, which was 62 feet behind the landing gear, with numerous physical barriers in between the tank and the gear, have caused such severe concussive damage to that gear? How?

The ARAP TWA 800 report notes the following about the implication of the damage to the landing gear:

The nose gear doors were forced into the gear well before the aircraft hit the water. See NTSB Exhibit 7A. . . .

The landing gear on a B747 are extremely tough. They can be extended at speeds up to 320 knots Indicated Air Speed (IAS), or .82 mach, and can be raised at speeds up to 270 knots IAS, or.82mach. Flight 800’s airspeed was 298 IAS and .6 mach! This means that even if the Captain had intentionally lowered the landing gear in flight at 13,800 feet, nothing in the landing gear or gear door assemblies would have failed. (Interim Report on the Crash of TWA Flight 800 and the Actions of the NTSB and the FBI, July 17, 1998, p. 18)

James Sanders and Jack Cashill provide helpful information about the damage to the nose landing gear, including the fact that residue on the landing gear tested positive for explosive material:

Although the landing gear had been retracted into its housing before the plane exploded, “serious concussive damage” disfigured its hydraulic mechanism. This was not easily done. With the exception of certain engine components, the landing gear is the strongest single part of an aircraft, made as it is of steel and titanium. . . .

With on-site results testing positive, “samples of apparent residue found on the landing gear have been sent to the F.B.I. lab in Washington to find if they hold chemical traces of an explosive.” (First Strike, p. 52)

The testing of residue samples at the Calverton hangar was done with the super-sensitive EGIS explosive detection system. Over 100 items from the plane, including some from the exterior, tested positive for explosive material when tested by the EGIS machines at the hangar. False positives are extremely rare, if not unheard of, with EGIS. Yet, the FBI and the NTSB would have us believe that EGIS produced an astounding 100-plus false positives in this case, a preposterous claim.

(By the way, NTSB defenders refer to EGIS units as “portable,” implying that they’re not very thorough. Actually, each EGIS machine weighs about 300 pounds, and EGIS is a highly sophisticated and extremely sensitive detection system. Israel bought a number of EGIS units. In its day, EGIS was the standard by which other detection systems were judged.)

Quote:

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1:

-- The front landing-gear doors on the exterior of the plane were blown inward. There is no way that an explosion of the center fuel tank could have blown those doors inward. Only an explosion outside the aircraft could have done this.

Originally Posted by Axxman300:

First off, all landing gear doors are on the exterior of the plane. Second, the nose gear doors were found furthest from the main wreck site, meaning they came off first, not blown inward. And if you don't mean the nose gear you need to specifically site which set of landing gear you're talking about, Mr. Qualified Expert.

I said the “front landing gear.” But, yes, we’re talking about the nose landing gear.

Three of the four nose gear doors were bent inward to the point of failure and separated from the plane.

The fact that those doors were found in the red zone, the zone closest to JFK, and far from the nose wreckage severely contradicts the NTSB’s version of the crash.

The ARAP TWA 800 report provides some useful information on the issue of the nose landing gear doors:

Three of the four nose gear doors separated from the aircraft in-flight and landed in the early debris field, well away from the nose wreckage.

A part of one nose wheel was recovered 5,200 feet short of where the wheel well landed. The nose gear door hinges failed by being pushed into the wheel well bay to the point of failure.

The nose gear assembly was pushed up beyond its normal travel, a hydraulic actuating cylinder was found ruptured. Hydraulic cylinders are very tough, routinely handling 3,000 PSI hydraulic fluid.

The nose wheels of a 747 in flight are tucked up 62 feet forward of the front wall of the center wing tank. It is literally impossible for a center wing tank explosion of any magnitude to produce the damage in evidence on these components. . . .

The NTSB’s claim that these doors were torn from the aircraft by the slipstream is not supported by its design, the damage pattern on the doors, or their location in the debris field.

Item CO91 “Part of Tire” was found in the early Red Zone @ 40 38 26.58 / 72 39 06.48, is listed in the NTSB Debris Field database printed on 13 November 1996. (Red Zone is the early debris field, first parts to leave the aircraft, Yellow Zone is the Cockpit debris and Green Zone is the remainder of the aircraft, 18,000 feet from the first debris).

Item A206 “RH Nose Gear wheel door” was found in the Red Zone @ 40 38 35.92 / 72 38 44.95 on 6 Aug 1996. Item B002 “RH Nose Wheel and tire” was found in the Yellow Zone @ 40 39 03 / 72 38 32.

Item B297 “Nose Wheel FS 340 LH Side” was found in the Yellow Zone @ 40 39 04.7 / 72 38 26.8 on 8 Aug 1996. (pp. 18-19)

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

The ARAP TWA 800 report...

Who accredits this organization?

[KDLarsen]

Originally Posted by JayUtah

Who accredits this organization?

Presumably the same people who accredits the upstanding folks over at AE911...

ARAP is apparently a front for William S. Donaldson, a retired US naval officer, who buys heavily into a two-missile theory.

[mikegriffith1]

Originally Posted by KDLarsen

Presumably the same people who accredits the upstanding folks over at AE911....

You obviously know nothing about ARAP. Nobody in ARAP would have any sympathy for the nutty views of AE911 and their ilk.

Quote:

ARAP is apparently a front for William S. Donaldson, a retired US naval officer, who buys heavily into a two-missile theory.

A "front"??? This is just comical. Well, a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, belonged to that "front," as did Admiral Mark Hill, who knew more about missile operations than anyone in the FBI or the NTSB. Other members of ARAP include the following (some are now deceased):

* General Ben Partin, another missile expert who played a key role in developing the continuous rod missile system.
* Howard Mann, a former TWA pilot and crash investigator.
* Dr. Gregory Harrison, a fire safety engineer whose PhD was in safety engineering (he was also a court-certified expert witness in accident forensics in eight states).
* Al Mundo, a former TWA pilot (as chance would have it, he flew the TWA plane on its flight from Athens to JFK earlier in the day of the accident).
* Reed Irvine, founder of AIM.
* Ray Lahr, a former pilot and accident investigator.
* Robert Donaldson, a computer scientist who wrote an extensive critique of the CIA's TWA 800 animation.
* Bruce Valley, a former Navy commander and pilot.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

A "front"??? This is just comical.

Is this organization accredited or recognized by anyone?

[bknight]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

You obviously know nothing about ARAP. Nobody in ARAP would have any sympathy for the nutty views of AE911 and their ilk.



A "front"??? This is just comical. Well, a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, belonged to that "front," as did Admiral Mark Hill, who knew more about missile operations than anyone in the FBI or the NTSB. Other members of ARAP include the following (some are now deceased):

* General Ben Partin, another missile expert who played a key role in developing the continuous rod missile system.
* Howard Mann, a former TWA pilot and crash investigator.
* Dr. Gregory Harrison, a fire safety engineer whose PhD was in safety engineering (he was also a court-certified expert witness in accident forensics in eight states).
* Al Mundo, a former TWA pilot (as chance would have it, he flew the TWA plane on its flight from Athens to JFK earlier in the day of the accident).
* Reed Irvine, founder of AIM.
* Ray Lahr, a former pilot and accident investigator.
* Robert Donaldson, a computer scientist who wrote an extensive critique of the CIA's TWA 800 animation.
* Bruce Valley, a former Navy commander and pilot.

No answers to any question, who can take you seriously. Get a life outside of CTs.

[KDLarsen]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

You obviously know nothing about ARAP. Nobody in ARAP would have any sympathy for the nutty views of AE911 and their ilk.



A "front"??? This is just comical. Well, a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, belonged to that "front," as did Admiral Mark Hill, who knew more about missile operations than anyone in the FBI or the NTSB. Other members of ARAP include the following (some are now deceased):

* General Ben Partin, another missile expert who played a key role in developing the continuous rod missile system.
* Howard Mann, a former TWA pilot and crash investigator.
* Dr. Gregory Harrison, a fire safety engineer whose PhD was in safety engineering (he was also a court-certified expert witness in accident forensics in eight states).
* Al Mundo, a former TWA pilot (as chance would have it, he flew the TWA plane on its flight from Athens to JFK earlier in the day of the accident).
* Reed Irvine, founder of AIM.
* Ray Lahr, a former pilot and accident investigator.
* Robert Donaldson, a computer scientist who wrote an extensive critique of the CIA's TWA 800 animation.
* Bruce Valley, a former Navy commander and pilot.

I fail to see the difference? It's a group of people, some of whom have an interesting and impressive resume, but which at its core remains an appeal to authority.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by KDLarsen

I fail to see the difference? It's a group of people, some of whom have an interesting and impressive resume, but which at its core remains an appeal to authority.

AE911T at least managed to get itself tolerated at professional conferences for architects and engineers once or twice. Here all we really have is a web site devoted to Donaldson, riddled with typos and dead links, and maintained (until recently) by another Donaldson (the computer guy whose affidavit is packed with stuff outside his field; it just regurgitates Stalcup). And yes, we discussed the credibility of ARAP back in 2013. They don't suddenly become credible again just because someone new has discovered it.

It's unclear how—if in any way—there was ever any actual association. Moorer, for example, participated in one poorly-attended press conference. At the time, he was well into his 80s and living in a nursing home. Gen. Partin had been retired from the military for 25 years by the time this "association" occurred and spend a fair amount of that time lecturing on his conspiracy theories regarding Waco and Oklahoma City. In the latter case, he was able to immediately determine from a couple of photos printed in the press that the Oklahoma City bombing was an inside job. Despite claims to the contrary, at least one member of ARAP has quite a history of the kind of armchair structural engineering perpetrated by AE911T. Henry Mann's actual professional experience seems to vary wildly depending on who he's giving interviews to.

Here's the membership list as ARAP reports it: https://twa800.com/pages/members.html . It differs slightly from the list we were quoted above with no attribution or citation. But yes, it's the usual suspects: all the people (minus Stalcup) who groveled for attention in the decade or so following the TWA 800 investigation. Many of them, as stated, have now passed on.

The "ARAP report" is nothing more than a document authored sua sponte by W. Donaldson (not R. Donaldson, the webmaster and wayward affiant). The way it's postured makes it sound like it was commissioned by a Congressional subcommittee, but it wasn't. It was bankrolled by Reed Irvine and sent unsolicited to the subcommittee. Donaldson performed zero actual investigation himself; it's purely a critique of the official narrative which then somehow leads him to the untested conclusion that the real cause of the crash was a shoulder-fired air-intercept missile.

Irvine, of course, is not an "aviation professional," but rather an economist who founded the notorious Accuracy In Media organization. Not the kind of person who instills confidence that he's promoting an "independent" investigation. And as I recall, Ray Lahr went down the Trump rabbit hole pretty hard late in his life. Harrison too had nothing to do with aviation. The only thing these guys seem to have in common is a preconceived conclusion regarding a missile, a lot of free time on their hands, and reasons to want to embarrass the Clinton administration.

As I keep mentioning, the gallop is pretty obvious here. As soon as we start looking at each of these contributors in detail, we see some pretty concerning reasons to trust either their competence or their impartiality or both. But at the gallop level, we still have little if anything. No professional or academic body endorsed ARAP. They published exactly nothing in a peer-reviewed forum. None of the organizations from which these allegedly illustrious people arose endorsed their activity regarding TWA 800. The best they were able to accomplish is some write-ups in minority media outlets, including our favorite World Net Daily.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

None of this addresses the concussive damage to the front landing gear...

Characterizing the damage to the forward landing gear assemblies as "concussive" is speculative and conclusory if it is meant to support concussion as from a blast wave front. The term has a precise meaning in forensic engineering related to strain rates, irrespective of the cause of the strain.

Quote:

That damage could not have been done by a low-order explosion of the center fuel tank nor by the force of the impact on the ocean.

The mainstream narrative does not claim this causation for the damage observed on the nose landing gear.

Quote:

I quote from a story published in the Baltimore Sun on July 31, 1996...

Your source reports conclusory statements from people who assumed there was a bomb on board, which conflicts with the narrative of an air-intercept missile.

Quote:

This was at the time when the FBI appeared ready to go with, or at least reluctantly accept, the bomb explanation, since the missile explanation was summarily and prematurely rejected by key officials within days after the crash, if not hours.

At that premature state of the investigation, the landscape of evidence was such that a bomb was more probable than a missile, and not objectively improbable. The landscape of evidence changed many times as the evidence was discovered and developed, and since your source was published, eventually ruling out both a bomb and a missile. Cherry-picking claims made early in the investigation does not shed better light on it.

Quote:

Anyway, how in the world could a low-order explosion in the center fuel tank, which was 62 feet behind the landing gear, with numerous physical barriers in between the tank and the gear, have caused such severe concussive damage to that gear? How?

The mainstream narrative does not conclude that a "low-order explosion" was the proximal cause of the damage to the landing gear structural and hydraulic assemblies.

Quote:

The ARAP TWA 800 report notes the following about the implication of the damage to the landing gear...

The report errs in a number of ways.

First, it claims (or rather you do; the report is actually accurate on this point) that the doors themselves were forced into the nose gear well. This misstates the factual findings; the nose gear door hinges were found forced into the nose gear well, and W. Donaldson accurately reports this finding. You don't state it explicitly, but you insinuate that the doors themselves being forced into the gear well must necessarily be proof of an external explosion (rather than one from inside and aft), must have occurred at altitude, and thus evidence of an air-intercept missile with a fragmentation warhead. This is not in accordance with the facts or a defensible inference of when the nose gear doors must have incurred the damage we observed on them.

Second, it dismisses the mainstream narrative of an aerodynamic breakup as the explanation for the deformations observed on the recovered doors on the basis that normal in-flight operation places extension and retraction of the nose landing gear within an operation envelope that includes substantial aerodynamic forces (ca. 0.8 Mach). However, normal operation presents the doors edge-on to the slipstream, practically eliminating any substantial drag. If the forward fuselage detaches, the slipstream is not guaranteed to be longitudinal. The doors, presuming they were jarred into the open position (which is supported by evidence observed on the hinges and door actuators), they present a markedly more drag-sensitive profile.

Aerodynamic breakup or deformation of airframe components in abnormal angles of attack is well substantiated in the literature and borne out in my own testing and simulations. Also the distribution of debris as a determiner of the altitude at which structural breakup occurs is also well documented. Donaldson's baffling and unsupported claim to the contrary casts serious doubt on either his competence or his impartiality. To me more specific:

Third, the report alleges

Quote:

The NTSB’s claim that these doors were torn from the aircraft by the slipstream is not supported by its design, the damage pattern on the doors, or their location in the debris field.

The report simply alludes to "design" while providing no details or analysis. I have already discussed the damage pattern, which W. Donaldson dismisses on straw-man grounds. Donaldson purports to be experienced in air incident investigation with U.S. Navy, but does not explain how this translates to large airframe or commercial design experience. The location of the nose gear doors in the debris field (i.e., closer to the airport than to the bulk of the fuselage) absolutely supports an early-stage separation at altitude from the rest of the forward fuselage. Donaldson is simply wong here. When high-drag, low-mass components separate at altitude, they fall more vertically and therefore appear early along the flight path in the debris field compared to debris that has a higher mass-to-drag ratio.

Moving on to the gear itself, the report asserts that cracking of the actuator cylinder is deemed anomalous because, according to Donaldson, "[h]ydraulic cylinders are very tough, routinely handling 3,000 PSI hydraulic fluid." This conflates pressure-bearing strength with yield strength from bending moments. The two are not related, and if Donaldson had been a properly-qualified engineer he would have known this.

[Axxman300]

Quote:

Anyway, how in the world could a low-order explosion in the center fuel tank, which was 62 feet behind the landing gear, with numerous physical barriers in between the tank and the gear, have caused such severe concussive damage to that gear? How?

I'm going with gravity and basic physics.

Quote:

With on-site results testing positive, “samples of apparent residue found on the landing gear have been sent to the F.B.I. lab in Washington to find if they hold chemical traces of an explosive.” (First Strike, p. 52)[/font]

The testing of residue samples at the Calverton hangar was done with the super-sensitive EGIS explosive detection system. Over 100 items from the plane, including some from the exterior, tested positive for explosive material when tested by the EGIS machines at the hangar. False positives are extremely rare, if not unheard of, with EGIS. Yet, the FBI and the NTSB would have us believe that EGIS produced an astounding 100-plus false positives in this case, a preposterous claim.

The fuselage of TWA-800 sat in an NTSB warehouse for over 20 years. It was used to train investigators during that time. Hundreds of qualified experts crawled all over the outside and inside of the wreck. Not one of those people ever found anything to contradict the report's findings.

Why is that?

And the FBI was looking for/hoping for a bomb. The NTSB already had Pan Am 103 under their belts, and they saw no evidence of a bomb.

And this is what a bomb on a 747 looks like:

https://www.jesip.org.uk/wp-content/...ent-Report.pdf

I know you won't read it, but there is a long list factors verifying an explosive device. None of that was found on TWA-800.

Quote:

A "front"??? This is just comical. Well, a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, belonged to that "front," as did Admiral Mark Hill, who knew more about missile operations than anyone in the FBI or the NTSB. Other members of ARAP include the following (some are now deceased):

* General Ben Partin, another missile expert who played a key role in developing the continuous rod missile system.
* Howard Mann, a former TWA pilot and crash investigator.
* Dr. Gregory Harrison, a fire safety engineer whose PhD was in safety engineering (he was also a court-certified expert witness in accident forensics in eight states).
* Al Mundo, a former TWA pilot (as chance would have it, he flew the TWA plane on its flight from Athens to JFK earlier in the day of the accident).
* Reed Irvine, founder of AIM.
* Ray Lahr, a former pilot and accident investigator.
* Robert Donaldson, a computer scientist who wrote an extensive critique of the CIA's TWA 800 animation.
* Bruce Valley, a former Navy commander and pilot.

Smart people can believe dumb things. Some people need an evil force to fight to make themselves feel better about not fighting real evil. They're part of an intellectual fetish S&M cult wherein they're victimized by an unseen cabal controlling "the truth". They spew a lot of hot air, but no facts.

What is the name of the ship that fired this mythical test missile?
Why conduct a missile test in the busiest commercial air-traffic center in the US?
Why not conduct the missile test where they usually conduct missile tests in the eastern Pacific, where it's closer legistally to where these weapons are made? (why waste money?)
What happened when they tested this missile in Utah or New Mexico that forced them to run a dangerous test off of Long Island, New York instead of working with existing test protocols?

Why can't ARAP answer any of these questions.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by Axxman300

I'm going with gravity and basic physics.

I'm baffled that these allegedly experienced investigators rely so heavily on a fairly egregious straw man: that if damage observed in the recovered wreckage can't be directly attributable to the CFT deflagration at 13,000 ft MSL, then the deflagration theory doesn't hold. Do these people not understand the crash sequence in a midair breakup?

Quote:

What is the name of the ship that fired this mythical test missile?
Why conduct a missile test in the busiest commercial air-traffic center in the US?
Why not conduct the missile test where they usually conduct missile tests in the eastern Pacific, where it's closer legistally to where these weapons are made? (why waste money?)
What happened when they tested this missile in Utah or New Mexico that forced them to run a dangerous test off of Long Island, New York instead of working with existing test protocols?

Why can't ARAP answer any of these questions.

Because Donaldson argues for shoulder-fired FIM-92 missiles, not the platform-launched SM-2 that Stalcup and others argue. The fact that the missile advocates can't even agree on the type of missile, the mission, and the launch platform tells me that it's more about avoiding an unwanted conclusion than about going where the evidence inexorably points. Mike himself even says he's not concerned about the details of the missile theory. It's the standard conspiracy-theorist two-step: We have to reject the mainstream narrative because it's too full of holes, but we have to accept the conspiracy theory no matter how full of holes it is.

[bknight]

Originally Posted by JayUtah

...
We have to reject the mainstream narrative because it's too full of holes, but we have to accept the conspiracy theory no matter how full of holes it is.

Originally Posted by Axxman300

I'm going with gravity and basic physics.

...

Now you guys and I know that science, logic, and engineering is trumped by CT lunacy.

[Axxman300]

Originally Posted by JayUtah

Because Donaldson argues for shoulder-fired FIM-92 missiles, not the platform-launched SM-2 that Stalcup and others argue. The fact that the missile advocates can't even agree on the type of missile, the mission, and the launch platform tells me that it's more about avoiding an unwanted conclusion than about going where the evidence inexorably points. Mike himself even says he's not concerned about the details of the missile theory. It's the standard conspiracy-theorist two-step: We have to reject the mainstream narrative because it's too full of holes, but we have to accept the conspiracy theory no matter how full of holes it is.

And it is inconsistent with the NYC FBI office's actions during the mid-1990s. After the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing, the FBI and NYPD foiled another attack planned on the subway system, and we know FBI agent, John Douglas was running his own Bin Laden operation. The idea that the Bureau blew off evidence of a missile or a bomb is laughable. And even had it been a Navy-launched weapon, the FBI has no skin in the DoD game. We saw this with their leaking of memos regarding treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and that was after 9/11 when they had to know few people would care. They wouldn't sit by and give the Navy a pass, not when the FBI flies out of the same airport.

[mikegriffith1]

The CNN reports quoted below are two of the many examples of the fact that some TWA 800 investigators recognized the indications that this was no mechanical failure and shared this information with journalists. Sadly, none of these investigators were among the senior officials who were steering the investigation to the mechanical-failure conclusion. The first article, titled “Nose Gear Doors Baffle TWA Crash Investigators,” was published by CNN on 9/5/1997:

Federal officials investigating the crash of TWA Flight 800 are baffled by the recent discovery of impact damage on the doors that close over the front landing gear.

According to several people involved in the investigation, for the last two weeks National Transportation Safety Board investigators have been trying to figure out what could have caused the nose gear doors to blow inward -- and whether whatever caused that damage happened before the plane's center fuel tank exploded. . . .

Examiners who have been looking at crash wreckage for the past 13 months are now said to be mystified about the significance of the damage on the doors, which are located below the flight deck and well forward of the plane's center fuel tank. The investigators are equally troubled by the fact that these nose gear doors were among the first things on the plane to have come off in flight.

Another CNN report, titled "Sources Say Evidence Suggests Bomb," based on information from TWA 800 investigators, noted that metal fragments removed from some of the bodies contained pitting patterns, which are common in high-powered explosions caused by explosive ordnance. One of the indications that Malaysian Airlines Flight MH-17 was downed by a missile was that there were pitting patterns on some of the debris. I quote from the CNN report:

Some pieces of metal removed from some victim's bodies contain "pitting patterns, considered to be the signature of a bomb blast, the source said. Investigators see this as key evidence that points to a bomb and rules out mechanical failure as a cause, according to the official. (“Sources Say Evidence Suggests Bomb,” CNN, 7/29/1996)

The ARAP TWA 800 report notes that one of the bodies from the First-Class cabin had a large metal fragment from a seat armrest imbedded deep in the chest, and it makes the logical point that only metal that passed through the cabin at high velocity could have done this:

One First Class passenger was found to have a particularly deep chest penetration by a large piece of metal from a seat armrest.

There are no rational theories as to how a seat armrest can be broken up and a piece propelled at high velocity without accepting the notion that high velocity metal passed through the First Class cabin. (p. 26, available at https://twa800.com/report/final.pdf).

It is impossible to fathom how a low-order explosion of the center fuel tank could have propelled a metal fragment from an armrest with enough force to penetrate deep into a person’s chest in the First Class cabin.

By the way, speaking of ARAP’s TWA 800 report, former NTSB member Dr. Vernon Grose was so impressed with the report that he appeared at a 7/20/1998 news conference with William Donaldson to announce the report’s release. Dr. Grose stated he could no longer support the theory that a center fuel tank explosion was the initiating event, and he added there was sufficient new evidence that a missile could have shot down TWA 800.

You can read Dr. Grose’s full bio here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_L._Grose. A few excerpts from it:

In 1952, following his graduation from Whitworth University, Grose joined the staff at Boeing, working with the Applied Physics department. While at Boeing, he wrote the test documentation for the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic thermonuclear missile. He was also responsible for Boeing's initial testing, which utilized three separate and dynamic environments at the same time. He remained with Boeing through 1959. After working with Boeing, Grose joined the staff of Litton Industries in Woodland Hills, California, where he served as the Director of Reliability and Program Manager of Project SPARR, an Air Force program designed to address general and applied research problems related to space systems. He was responsible for overseeing an applied research space systems risk management program on behalf of the United States Air Force.

Grose joined the staff of Northrop Ventura in Rancho El Conejo, California, in 1962, serving as the Director of Applied Technology. In this role, he was responsible for test activities for the engineering department. He participated in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo projects of the National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA), overseeing the chemistry, metallurgy, reliability, configuration management, and value engineering of the program. In 1964, he transferred to Rocketdyne, which was a division of Rockwell International. At Rocketdyne, located in Van Nuys, Grose was named the Chief of Reliability, where he continued to focus on North American aviation, specifically participating in the development of the Gemini and Apollo space programs.

Are you pro-NTSB diehards, you who attack anyone who says the NTSB emperor has no clothes—are you gonna call Dr. Grose a “crackpot” too?

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

The CNN reports quoted below...

Gish galloping.

Quote:

The ARAP TWA 800 report...

...is not credible, for the reasons given. And you're not the first person to come here peddling that crap and pretending it gives you an advantage.

Quote:

It is impossible to fathom how a low-order explosion...

Same straw man, over and over.

Quote:

By the way...

The Gish gallop continues.

Quote:

Are you pro-NTSB diehards...

No, we're not the ones who are ideologically motivated. Did you stop to consider that we disagree with your claims because they're insubstantial, poorly-reasoned, and poorly-evidenced, and not because we're "die hard" anything? You seem very eager to write off criticism as biased or uninformed rather than to address it at face value.

I'm at least as qualified, if not more so, than many of the people whose names you've cited. You seem to have absolutely no respect for expertise that doesn't come from your side of the debate. To you I'm just a "die hard" defender of the NTSB.

Quote:

...you who attack anyone who says the NTSB emperor has no clothes—are you gonna call Dr. Grose a “crackpot” too?

Straw man. You resurrected this thread after nearly a decade to insist that Tom Stalcup, as a physicist, was highly qualified to investigate an air accident and expertly interpret radar. You are the one appealing to authority, and then frantically trying to change the subject every time your alleged experts' qualifications are examined in detail. We started with Stalcup. Then you shifted quickly to members of ARAP. And now you're tossing a new person out there.

Yes, I can discuss Vernon Grose and his possible reasons for attending the press conference. But since you don't want any of your proffered experts examined in detail, I can't see why we should come gallop along with you until you're ready to actually study them in depth.

The press conference you speak of was orchestrated by Reed Irvine, who was trying to get his money's worth in any way he could after bankrolling Donaldson's work. It was poorly attended, as Irvine had a well-earned reputation. Keeping in mind that Grose did not participate in the NTSB investigation of TWA 800, where do think any bias might properly lie in this event?

[mikegriffith1]

Any discussion about the finding of explosive residue inside TWA 800 must include the long streak of reddish-orange residue that was found on the upper backs of seats in rows 17, 18, and 19. One of the investigators in the Calverton hangar, Captain Terrell Stacey, cut two pieces of foam from one of the reddish-orange-stained seats and turned them over to investigative journalist James Sanders for testing. Stacey did this because he had become convinced that the NTSB investigation was a cover-up.

Sanders had one of the pieces tested at a commercial lab in California, West Coast Analytical Services. The FBI and the NTSB later claimed the reddish-orange residue was 3M glue, but the commercial lab’s test results clearly indicated the residue was explosive residue:

The high amounts of magnesium, calcium, aluminum, iron, and antimony were all key ingredients of incendiary devices and would not be legally allowed in any “glue” associated with airplane cabin interior. Calcium, which is used when extreme heat is desired, made up 12 percent of the reddish-orange residue. All told, 99 percent of the elements by volume in the residue samples were consistent with elements expected to be found in an incendiary warhead.

Additional research revealed that “energized explosives” used in warheads create much more heat when magnesium, boron, aluminum, and zinc are added to RDX and/or PETN. These elements comprised a significant percentage of the residue Sanders received from Stacey. As noted earlier, PETN samples—and RDX samples—had been found and confirmed on Flight 800 debris from this same area of penetration, the right-side passenger cabin between rows 17 and 27. (Jack Cashill and James Sanders, First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Kindle Edition, 2003, p. 112)

When the damning lab results were published in a newspaper in California and republished by some other newspapers, the NTSB and the FBI resorted to outright falsehood and evidence tampering. Cashill and Sanders:

To sustain the NTSB’s story, the senior NTSB scientist at Calverton Hangar, Dr. Merrit Birky, chairman of the Flight 800 Fire and Explosion Group, sent some “brown to reddish-brown colored material” to NASA for testing. He would claim that the substance, upon testing, was revealed to be “consistent with a polychloroprene 3M Scotch-Grip 1357 High Performance contact adhesive.” The NTSB then circulated this report among the establishment media, as though it were independent proof that Sanders’s residue was glue.

Aware of the intrigue, Sanders picked up the phone and called Charles Bassett, the NASA chemist who had tested some of the samples for the NTSB. To clarify matters, Bassett provided Sanders with an affidavit. In its Bassett admitted that the tests he conducted “did not identify specific elements, by quantity, within the reddish-orange residue of the sample submitted to them by Mr. Sanders.” As Bassett acknowledged, this made it impossible to compare Sanders’s sample with the one sent by Birky.

To complicate matters, someone tampered with at least one of the rectangular samples the NTSB sent to NASA for testing. The sample in question is uniformly pinkish-red in color. It looks nothing like the darker, streaked red-orange of Sanders’s sample nor the “reddish-brown colored material” the NTSB claims it sent. Worse, none of the adjacent area on the relevant seat, 19-2, is red at all. Sanders discovered this when photographing the reconstructed plane as part of his limited discovery in December 1998. Someone had apparently smeared the NTSB sample with red dye to lend the illusion of redness and sent it on to NASA.

Despite the pressure, Dr. Bassett at NASA made a tough and honest declaration. He had no idea whether the residue he had tested was the same residue Sanders had tested. (First Strike, p. 124)

Dr. Stalcup then had the 3M Scotch-Grip 1357 glue tested at a lab at Florida State University. The results showed that the glue was nothing like the Sanders sample:

In the absence of any official effort to compare the composition of 3M adhesive Scotch Grip 1357 to the residue found on Sanders’s sample, physicist Dr. Thomas Stalcup had the adhesive tested at a Florida State University lab.

As Stalcup discovered, Scotch Grip 1357 contained no silicon and barely and aluminum. Silicon is a common solid-rocket-fuel ingredient. Calcium is the pyrotechnic that provides the burn when mixed with oxygen-providing perchlorate. Aluminum powder fuels the rocket. Sanders’s sample, by contrast, contained 15 percent silicon, 12 percent calcium, and 2.8 percent aluminum. In total, these three key components comprise nearly 30 percent of Sanders’s sample, but less than three one-hundredths of 1 percent of the adhesive. (First Strike, pp. 124-125)

Indeed, the West Coast Analytical Services test results also show that the reddish-orange residue was very different from 3M glue:

Magnesium
18% (residue)
2.5% (3M glue)

Silicon
15% (residue)
.0005% (3M glue)

Calcium
12% (residue)
.0020% (3M glue)

Zinc
3.6 % (residue)
.043% (3M glue)

Iron
3.1% (residue)
.0041% (3M glue)

Aluminum
2.8% (residue)
.0065% (3M glue)

Lead
2.4% (residue)
0% (3M glue)

Titanium
1.7% (residue)
.00012% (3M glue)

Manganese
.21% (residue)
.00048% (3M glue)

For the complete comparison between the reddish-orange residue and 3M glue, and for information about the NTSB’s inexcusable refusal to follow up on NASA’s finding that the first metal aircraft part recovered from the crash contained nitrates, see this article:

Investigation of Red Residue
[URL unfurl="true"]https://twa800.com/sanders/analysis.htm[/url]

Incredibly, the NTSB report claimed that NASA testing found that “several samples of the substance taken from the seatbacks identified these substances as being consistent with adhesives” (p. 118).

The NTSB report also repeated the falsehood that bomb-sniffing training was done on the TWA 800 plane in St. Louis on June 10, 1996 (pp. 118-119), even though that falsehood had been thoroughly exposed by the time the report was published.

By the way, the kind of explosive material that the STLPD officer used in the bomb-sniffing training had no PETN or RDX in it. Thus, even if the officer had done the training on the TWA 800 plane, his training aids would not have left any traces of PETN or RDX.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

Any discussion...

Gish gallop continues unabated.

[Axxman300]

And yet no sign of a bomb nor a missile detonation.

[Axxman300]

Why wasn't United-811 a bomb or a missile?

[Garrison]

Honestly bad wiring causing a fuel tank explosion seems pretty straightforward as an explanation after you've watched a few seasons of Air Crash Investigation. I mean an elevator jams because someone forgot to put a cotter pin back, a plane slams into the ground after running out of fuel because a mechanic leaves the pressurization switch set to manual, etc. Frankly unless the people pushing this CT can provide the name of the ship and an affidavit from the crew saying 'yes we fired a missile' I'll accept Boeing built a plane with bad wiring and their luck ran out on TWA-800.

[mikegriffith1]

Quote:

mikegriffith1:

Umm, no. It is not saying that at all. It is saying that a basic principle of critical thinking is that you must read both sides of an issue before reaching a conclusion about it.

I find the slavish acceptance of the NTSB report curious, given what we now know about the investigation, such as the following:

-- the fierce internal dissent that existed over the conclusions;

Originally Posted by bknight:

details and back up please.

I take it you have not watched any of the critical documentaries or read any of the better critical books on TWA 800.

Hank Hughes, a senior NTSB investigator who took part in the TWA 800 investigation, discusses some of this dissent in his affidavit filed for the TWA 800 Project’s petition for reconsideration. Here is a link to his affidavit: https://twa800project.files.wordpres...-affidavit.pdf.

Quote:

mikegriffith1:

-- the substantial alteration of the Airplane Interior Documentation Group's report without the author's knowledge or consent;
-- the removal of dozens of airplane parts from the hangar;

Originally Posted by bknight:

proof thereof

Hughes discusses these two points at length in his affidavit. They are also discussed in the books by James Sanders and Jack Cashill. They are also discussed in the Cashill documentary Silenced and in the Borjesson-Stalcup documentary TWA Flight 800 . There’s a link to Silenced on my TWA 800 website. The Borjesson-Stalcup documentary is available for inexpensive rental or purchase on Amazon and YouTube.

Quote:

mikegriffith1

-- the physical altering of the floor of the center fuel tank to make it look like it was blown outward/downward (pre-alteration photos of the floor show that a large part of the floor was blown drastically upward/inward, and showed no part of it bent downward/outward);

Originally Posted by bknight:

proof of this alteration.

Photographic evidence of this alteration is presented in Silenced. This alteration is discussed in all of the other above-mentioned sources.

Quote:

mikegriffith1:

-- the continued suspicious and inexcusable withholding of important analyses;

Originally Posted by bknight:

what information has been withheld?

I listed some of it in an earlier reply. This withheld information is also discussed in all of the above-mentioned sources.

Quote:

mikegriffith1:

-- the switching of location tags on recovered parts because they didn't fit the NTSB scenario;[

Originally Posted by bknight:

Proof of switching.

Photographic evidence of this is presented in the Borjesson-Stalcup documentary. The switching is discussed in all of the other above-mentioned sources.

Quote:

mikegriffith1:

-- the erasure of the final four seconds of the Flight Data Recorder tape;

Originally Posted by bknight:

Proof of erasure.

This is discussed at length in the books by Sanders and Cashill. But, here’s a link to the affidavit filed by the audio expert who discovered the erasure:

https://twa800.com/lahr/affidavits/bb-glen-schulze.pdf

Sanders and Cashill say the following on this issue:

Audio expert Glenn Schulze had been following the case closely. For the last thirty years he had worked as an independent consultant whose clients included the U.S. Navy and the Applied Research labs at the University of Texas among other high-profile clients. Just before the crash in 1996, his expert testimony in a Connecticut court persuaded a judge that the NTSB’s ruling of “pilot error” in the case at hand was erroneous. The case shook Schulze’s confidence in the NTSB.

When he read of family member Don Nibert’s relentless quest for the truth, Schulze volunteered his services to Nibert for one dollar. He refused to accept the explanation for the confusion at the end of the FDR [Flight Data Recorder] without more hard evidence. So Schulze joined Donaldson and other investigators in requesting that the NTSB provide not just the tabular data but the waveform charts from the last thirty data blocks before and after the erasure gap at the end of the FDR.

This information did not arrive for nearly a year. What the NTSB finally sent was a small and truncated two-block set of waveforms immediately preceding the erasure gap—about 3 percent of the requested information. Nor would the NTSB supply a reason why it had once again stonewalled its critics.

Only the threat of legal action forced the NTSB to produce a full sixty-plus data-record block centered on the erasure gap. This time, however, the NTSB sent the information copied in reverse. The NTSB again offered no explanation for what seemed like petty obstructionism.

Despite significant distortion as a result of the tape reversal, Schulze was able to read the data. Only one problem, a large one: Each data block within a group of sixty-four such blocks ends with its own distinct number. The NTSB’s tabular data ended with the number 6. Its waveform charts ended with the number 4. The NTSB could offer no satisfactory explanation for the discrepancy.

Schulze, however, knew exactly what the discrepancy meant. Among other things it meant that the problem with the FDR was, if anything, more serious than what Donaldson had originally thought.

On December 12, 2000, Jim Hall, chairman of the NTSB, sat uncomfortably across from Don and Donna Nibert. There was good reason for his discomfort. The Niberts, from Montoursville, Pennsylvania, had lost their sixteen-year-old daughter in the crash of Flight 800 and had journeyed to Hall’s D.C. office to find out why. Hall, the least qualified and most political chair in NTSB history, surrounded himself with his director of research and engineering, a legal adviser, and two FDR specialists.

As a family member, Don Nibert was able to exert pressure others were not. Not one to give up, he had involved himself in the fight to secure the FDR data. In his efforts, he had enlisted Schulze and retired pilot Howard Mann, “who,” says Nibert, “knows more than any man alive.”

A college professor with a technical bent, Nibert was shocked by what the two men shared with him. “Both of them told me there were four seconds missing at the end of the tape,” remembers Nibert. “We had four seconds edited and removed. These are crucial seconds. They occur right at the end of the flight.”

What reason would the government have to remove the original four seconds? “Best guess,” says Schulze, “they show something hitting the airplane.”

Alarmed, Nibert secured the meeting with Jim Hall. Schulze attended at the Niberts’ request. As the meeting unfolded, Schulze made a lengthy, highly technical presentation to the NTSB’s top FDR experts. “The experts did not want to be there,” says Nibert. “You could cut the air with a knife there was so much hate in the room.”

Schulze paused briefly after explaining the first four of his five explanatory flip charts, looked squarely at the NTSB experts, and challenged them boldly: “Hard evidence extracted from the NTSB’s own reports is consistent with the FBI and NTSB withholding the last four Flight 800 FDR one-second data blocks and over 3,000 data bits from the public.”

In a world with more honor, these would have been fighting words. By the year 2000, however, at least at the top rungs of the NTSB, honor was largely a memory. If the science here is complex and not easily transcribed, the reaction of the accused needs no explanation. As Schulze’s notes reveal, “No NTSB staff member commented on or objected to the 4 missing seconds claim.” (First Strike, pp. 171-173)

Quote:

[b]mikegriffith1:

-- the editing of the video footage of the underwater recovery operation;

Originally Posted by bknight:

Proof of alteration.

This is discussed in the Borjesson-Stalcup documentary and in the materials authored by Hughes, Sanders, and Cashill. It’s also discussed in Speer’s affidavit.

Quote:

mikegriffith1:

-- the NTSB's refusal (via Dr. Birkey) to allow NASA's Dr. Bassett to conduct follow-up testing on a part (CW504) that tested positive for nitrates;

See the Hughes affidavit for more info on this, among other sources.

Quote:

mikegriffith1:

-- the making of the demonstrably false claim that the reddish-brown residue removed from one of the seats by Terrell Stacey and tested by a respected commercial lab in Los Angeles was merely 3M glue (in actuality, the lab's test results strongly indicated the residue was explosive residue);

Originally Posted by bknight:

Proof of this labs report.

I discussed the lab report at length in a previous reply. Here’s a link to that reply: http://www.internationalskeptics.com...postcount=2462

Quote:

mikegriffith1:

-- the making of the soundly refuted claim that a bomb-sniffing exercise was done on the TWA 800 plane in St. Louis two months before the crash (subsequent research indisputably established that the training was done on an empty Boeing 747 parked at a nearby gate--the pilot and co-pilot of the TWA 800 aircraft confirmed that no such training was done on the accident plane);

Originally Posted by bknight:

Red herring.

No, it is not. It is one example among many of the fact that some of the officials involved in the investigation lied and kept lying even after the lie was exposed. The FBI put out the false story about the St. Louis bomb-sniffing training before they had even interviewed the STLPD officer who did the training.

Quote:

mikegriffith1:

-- the brazenly misleading analysis of the eyewitness accounts;

Originally Posted by bknight:

Why is analysis of eye witness accounts misleading, eye witness accounts are on the LOW end of any investigation, unless you are supporting a conspiracy, then it is top drawer.

Actually, according to NTSB manuals, eyewitness testimony is important in crash investigations.

Perhaps you don't realize that we're talking about 100-plus witnesses who reported seeing an object streaking upward toward TWA 800 before it exploded.

For more info on the NTSB’s misleading analysis of the eyewitness accounts of a missile heading upward toward TWA 800, see the two above-mentioned documentaries. This is also discussed in the above-mentioned books and in the Hughes affidavit.

Quote:

mikegriffith1:

-- the stark contradictions between the CIA simulation and the NTSB simulation.

Originally Posted by bknight:

Lastly proof that there exists stark contradictions in the two simulations, not just your word. Links to each report and hi-lighted contradictions. Trust but verify.

Just watch the CIA and NTSB animations. The differences between them are obvious. The Borjesson-Stalcup documentary covers this issue well.

[bknight]

You can't give proof of a conspiracy by linking/quoting conspiracy theories. Be objective and delve into the investigations, not the apparent inconsistencies of the investigations.

[mikegriffith1]

The NTSB report attempts to give the impression that fuel-tank explosions like the one theorized for TWA 800 are not unprecedented:

The Safety Board has participated in the investigation of several aviation accidents/incidents involving fuel tank explosions. According to a list prepared by the FAA, since 1959 there have been at least 26 documented fuel tank explosions/fires in military and civilian transport-category airplanes (including TWA flight 800). Appendix G lists these fuel tank explosions/fires, several of which are discussed in greater detail in this section. (p. 179)

When we examine Appendix G, we see that the list of alleged examples of fuel-tank explosions is a mix of fraud and irrelevance.

First off, we can scratch TWA 800 from the list, since the NTSB did not determine the cause of the crash but only offered a "probable cause" theory and failed to produce any physical evidence that confirmed the theory (nor was the NTSB able to duplicate the theory in an experiment). Plus, it is poor logic to include Airliner A in a list that ostensibly presents precedents for your theory about Airliner A.

Thus, we're really only talking about 25 alleged examples of fuel-tank explosions. Consider the following facts about these proposed examples:

-- Of the 25 alleged examples, not one was a Boeing 747 center wing tank explosion caused by a spark from an internal ignition source. Not one.

-- Of the 25 alleged examples, not one was a Boeing 747, and not one was even a wide-body aircraft made by Boeing or by any other company. Not one.

-- 16 of the 25 supposed examples were in planes that were using JP-4 fuel. JP-4 fuel is far more flammable than the Jet-A fuel that TWA 800 was using.

Thus, we're really only talking about nine examples that include the crucial condition of Jet-A fuel. But, for the sake of argument, I will continue with the 25-examples assumption.

-- 15 of the 25 proposed examples did not even happen in the air but occurred on the ground.

-- Only eight of the 25 alleged examples involved center wing tanks. One of those eight examples was Avianca Flight 203, which, as the report acknowledges, was destroyed on 11/27/1989 by a bomb placed above the center wing tank! Are you kidding me? (Note: The list misspells Avianca as "Avionca.")

Another one of those eight examples, the 1990 explosion of Philippines Airlines Flight 143, may not have even involved a center wing tank explosion at all (see ARAP, Interim Report on the Crash of TWA Flight 800 and the Actions of the NTSB and the FBI, pp. 8-9, https://twa800.com/report/final.pdf).

-- A look at some of the other cases included in the remaining 25 supposed examples shows how badly the NTSB was reaching and straining when they endorsed and published the FAA's list. As you read each of these cases, ask yourself, "How in the world does this support the NTSB's theory that TWA 800's center wing tank exploded because of an unidentified short circuit outside the tank that supposedly generated a spark that then somehow escaped from the FQIS wiring inside the tank?" Let's take a look:

* The 1989 case of a Beechjet 400 (Be 400). The auxiliary tank ignited during ground refueling due to an electrostatic discharge from polyurethane foam. The tank remained intact.

* The 1974 case of a World Airways DC-8 using JP-4 fuel. The inboard main tank exploded when a mechanic forced a circuit breaker into an open fuel cell during ground maintenance.

* The 1964 case of a Southern Air Transport Boeing 727. A wing tank exploded when the center tank was being purged for entry and a static discharge occurred from a CO2 Firex Nozzle into the center tank access door during ground maintenance.

* The 1965 case of a Boeing 707 in San Francisco. An engine fire heated the wing's upper surface to over 900 degrees F. Not surprisingly, the wing's fuel tank exploded, destroying 21 feet of the wing. The plane landed safely.

* The 1980 case of a B-52G using JP-4 fuel. During ground maintenance, fuel was being transferred from body tanks to wing tanks. The empty mid-body tank exploded due to electrical arcing in the mid-body boost pump because a phased lead wire was mispositioned inside the pump. (Arcing is when an electric current moves through the air between two conductive points.)

The bottom line is that never in the history of aviation before 7/16/1996 had an airliner's center wing tank exploded from an internal ignition source, and no airliner has experienced such an explosion since then. This fact alone suggests that the NTSB's TWA 800 theory deserves a large dose of skepticism from the outset.

[JayUtah]

Gallop, gallop, gallop.

[bknight]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

snip the irrelevant speech.

The bottom line is that never in the history of aviation before 7/16/1996 had an airliner's center wing tank exploded from an internal ignition source, and no airliner has experienced such an explosion since then. This fact alone suggests that the NTSB's TWA 800 theory deserves a large dose of skepticism from the outset.

Of course not, Boeing was tasked with changing out the wiring on 747s in the wake of the explosion, making them safer and less prone to explosions. Obviously, you haven't read what Jay has been posting.
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/27/n...ing-747-s.html

[jadebox]

Never say "never before":

Originally Posted by https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_Airlines_Flight_143

Philippine Airlines Flight 143 (PR143) was a domestic flight from the Manila Ninoy Aquino Airport, Manila, Philippines to Mandurriao Airport, Iloilo City. On May 11, 1990, at Manila Ninoy Aquino International Airport the Boeing 737-300 (C/N 24466, MSN 1771) assigned to the route suffered an explosion in the central fuel tank and was consumed by fire in as little as four minutes.

Handwaving away the facts doesn't work here.

[SpitfireIX]

It was destroyed by a missile from a US cruiser based at Subic Bay.

[mikegriffith1]

Let's review facts about TWA 800 and the NTSB investigation that are established by hard/physical evidence and/or that are too well documented to be credibly denied:

-- The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) investigative team rejected the NTSB’s theory about the crash and concluded (1) that the center wing tank explosion was not the initiating event, (2) that the initiating event was a “high-pressure event” that breached the fuselage, that this high-pressure event caused a structural failure in the area of Flight Station 854 to 860 on the lower left side of the aircraft, and (3) that this high-pressure event also caused the center wing tank explosion (IAMAW, Analysis and Recommendations Regarding TWA Flight 800, p. 9, https://twa800.com/iamaw/iamaw.pdf).

-- Early photos of the center wing tank's floor and later photos of the floor prove that someone markedly altered the floor's appearance. The early photos show a large section of the floor bent severely upward/inward. In later photos, this large upward/inward-bent section is gone. The photos are presented in Jack Cashill’s documentary Silenced, among other sources.

-- 116 pieces of wreckage tested positive for explosive residue when tested by the sophisticated, highly-sensitive EGIS 3000 explosive residue detection machines at the Calverton hangar. False positives are very rare with EGIS. Yet, the FBI claimed that only a few of the 116 EGIS detections proved to be valid when tested at the FBI Lab, a preposterous proposition.

On May 10, 1999, Assistant FBI Director Donald Kerr, head of the FBI Lab Division, testified to a Senate subcommittee that those 116 pieces from the Calverton hangar were forwarded to the FBI Lab for further testing, and that only a few of those pieces once again tested positive for explosive residue (Administrative Oversight Hearing of the Investigation of TWA Flight 800, Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight, Senate Judiciary Committee, May 10, 1999, pp. 50-51, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/...6shrg65055.pdf). William Tobin, the FBI's chief metallurgist, told the subcommittee that in the FBI Lab testing, "there were three separate incidents, or instances, of the finding of high-explosive residues on various parts" (p. 23). The NTSB report likewise says that only three pieces tested positive for explosive residue when examined by the FBI Lab, and that one piece contained RDX, one contained NTG, and one contained both RDX and PETN:

Examination of recovered wreckage revealed trace amounts of explosive residue on three samples of material from three separate locations in the airplane wreckage. These material samples were submitted to the FBI’s laboratory in Washington, D.C., with many other material samples for analysis. The pieces on which these traces were found were described by the FBI as a piece of canvas-like material and two pieces of floor panel; however, the exact locations of the traces were not documented. According to the FBI's laboratory report, analysis of each of the three material samples revealed that they contained traces of different explosives: one contained cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine (RDX), one contained nitroglycerin, and one contained a combination of RDX and pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN). (NTSB report, p. 118)

The idea that the EGIS machines at the Calverton hangar suffered a false-positive rate of 115 out of 118 is beyond absurd. The EGIS 3000's rate for false positives when testing bare metal is approximately 1 in 10,000 (ARAP report, p. 35, https://twa800.com/report/final.pdf).

In his book on criminal forensics, Dr. Harold Trimm calls EGIS "the ultimate in speed, accuracy, and sensitivity" (Forensics the Easy Way, New York: Barron's Educational Series, 2005, p. 151).

A 1999 U.S. Department of Justice guide on selecting commercial explosives detection systems praised the EGIS system:

The best-known GC/chemiluminescence system is the Thermedics EGIS. It is capable of analyzing samples in 18 seconds, and because of its high sensitivity and excellent selectivity, it is a popular system with laboratory researchers and forensic analysts. (Guide for the Selection of Commercial Explosives Detection Systems for Law Enforcement Applications, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, 1999, p. 18)

In early 1990s, Germany's Ministry of Interior selected the EGIS 3000 system for use in all German airports (https://ir.thermofisher.com/investor...3/default.aspx).

In any other case, an allegation that two EGIS 3000 machines experienced a false-positive rate of 30% would be viewed as highly doubtful, if not impossible. Yet, the FBI and the NTSB would have us believe that the EGIS 3000 machines in the Calverton hangar experienced an astonishing false-positive rate of 98% (115 out of 118).

It is worth mentioning that the same FBI Lab that repeatedly declared that most of the Calverton EGIS detections were false positives was, during this same period, beset with accusations of fraud, evidence-tampering, and incompetence. The FBI's own Inspector General issued a report on the FBI Lab that documented numerous cases of inaccurate and scientifically flawed analysis, evidence mishandling, and evidence contamination.

The chief of the Explosives Unit at the FBI Lab during the TWA 800 investigation was J. Thomas Thurston. In a 1997 Senate hearing on problems with the FBI Lab, former Crime Lab Unit chief James Corby singled out Thurston as a problem and said Thurston "did alter reports intentionally" (https://twa800.com/sanders/analysis.htm).

Incidentally, the NTSB report does not even mention the 116 EGIS detections of explosive residue. Perhaps the authors of the report feared that even the most gullible persons would not swallow the idea that any detection system, much less the EGIS 3000, would experience such a staggering error rate.

-- In an effort to explain away the explosive-residue evidence, the NTSB report claims that canine bomb-sniffing training was conducted on the TWA 800 plane in St. Louis on June 10, 1996 (p. 118). This myth had already been debunked before the NTSB report was published, giving us another indication of the report's flawed and fraudulent nature.

It should be noted that the FBI made the false claim about the bomb-sniffing training before they had even interviewed the St. Louis Airport Police Department officer who did the training. In addition, the FBI never interviewed the two pilots who flew the TWA 800 plane from St. Louis on June 10, who could have told them that no such training was done on the plane. The training was done on another 747 that was parked nearby.

-- In another effort to explain away the explosive-residue evidence, the NTSB report claims that explosives are soluble in water and that therefore any explosive residue deposited on pieces of TWA 800’s wreckage would have dissolved in the water (p. 119). The TWA 800 Project refutes this claim:

. . . the NTSB inaccurately claimed that the explosives were soluble in water and therefore if a missile had deposited explosive residues on the wreckage, those residues would have dissolved in the water. However, according to a report published by Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, PETN “is practically insoluble in water.” And according to the United States Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the “solubility of RDX in water is low to negligible.” PETN and RDX are explosives used in missile warheads and were detected throughout the aircraft wreckage. (https://flight800doc.com/fact-checki...king-politico/)

Former senior NTSB investigator Hank Hughes has also debunked the NTSB's claim about the solubility of explosive residue. He notes that the test cited by the NTSB was done in unrealistic conditions that bore no resemblance to the conditions involved with the TWA 800 wreckage (Affidavit of Henry F. Hughes, pp. 35-36, https://twa800project.files.wordpres...ank-hughes.pdf)

-- The NTSB did not issue a determination of the cause of TWA 800's crash. Instead, the NTSB issued a "probable cause" finding that was based on an unproven theory. The NTSB theorized that a short circuit occurred outside the center wing tank, that this short circuit generated a spark, and that this spark entered the fuel tank through FQIS wiring and caused the tank to explode. The NTSB admitted it was unable to identify the ignition source. Moreover, the NTSB was unable to determine how the alleged spark escaped from the FQIS wiring, which wiring was specifically designed to prevent just such an occurrence. Crucially, despite the NTSB's expenditure of millions of dollars on sophisticated experiments, NTSB investigators were unable to reproduce the alleged energy transfer mechanisms in real-world conditions.

The TWA 800 Project notes,

There was absolutely no evidence of any short circuit occurring. On the contrary, when the gauge for the system allegedly responsible for the crash (the fuel quantity indication system [FQIS]) was reconstructed, it was in perfect working condition, which led Boeing engineers to conclude that no short circuit of any kind occurred in that system. (https://flight800doc.com/fact-checki...lar-mechanics/)

-- FBI agents were caught on surveillance video illegally removing parts from the TWA 800 wreckage at the Calverton hangar.

-- The reddish-orange residue on foam removed from one of the seats at the Calverton hangar was tested by a commercial lab and was found to contain large amounts of elements used in explosives. Terrell Stacey, a TWA member of the NTSB investigation, removed two pieces of seat foam stained with reddish-brown residue and gave them to investigative journalist James Sanders. Stacey did this because he had become convinced the NTSB investigation was a cover-up. Sanders had one of the pieces tested at a commercial lab in California (and sent the other piece to a CBS producer). The lab results showed that the residue contained high concentrations of elements used in missile fuel and pyrotechnics.

The lab results also showed that the residue's elements were very different from those of 3M glue. A test conducted at a Florida State University lab excluded 3M glue as a possible source of the reddish-orange residue. The FBI did test another piece of seat foam, but the residue on the piece looked quite different from the residue on the two Sanders pieces. If the FBI ever tested the other piece of foam that Stacey gave to Sanders, there is no record of it.

It should be noted that the FBI refused to allow CBS to have the other Sanders piece of foam tested by an independent lab. Instead, the FBI threatened CBS with legal action if they didn’t hand over the other Sanders piece of foam. Again, if the FBI ever did test the other Sanders piece of foam, there is no record of such a test.

-- There were puncture holes (i.e., inward-penetrating holes) in the exterior of the airplane. Such holes are common when a proximity-fused missile explodes within 100 feet of an airplane. Those holes could not have been caused by an explosion of the center wing tank.

-- There were spike-tooth fractures in the exterior of the airplane. Such fractures are caused by high-velocity explosions, not low-order/low-velocity explosions such as the one posited by the NTSB. Even the NTSB admitted that spike-tooth fractures are caused by high-energy events. The center wing tank explosion posited by the NTSB would have been a low-energy/low-velocity/low-order explosion, a deflagration.

Throughout the investigation, James Kallstrom, the head of the FBI's TWA 800 investigative effort, repeatedly used the straw-man scenario of a shoulder-fired missile to ignore the evidence of a proximity-fused missile. Kallstrom ensured that investigators only considered the scenario of a bomb or a shoulder-fired missile in their evidence analyses. Since the scientists operated under the assumption that a proximity-fused missile was out of the question, they overlooked (or did not feel at liberty to acknowledge) clear evidence that this kind of missile exploded near the airliner. The TWA 800 Project:

Metallurgists and forensic scientists correctly showed that the evidence was inconsistent with a bomb or a shoulder-launched missile. Some of these metallurgists and scientists were misled into believing that the lack of shoulder-fired missile damage meant a lack of any type of missile damage. These scientists didn’t lie. Most had never investigated a shoot-down before and were misled about what the damage patterns from certain missile types look like. The NTSB never ruled out a proximity-fused missile, since that type of missile damage was not considered at all, according to their final report. The word “proximity-fused” does not appear anywhere in the NTSB final report. . . .

The extreme forces of air resistance on small projectiles exiting a missile a distance away from a target significantly reduces the speed of these projectiles. So even “low velocity holes” are consistent with a proximity-fused missile. What’s very important is the inward moving trajectory of the projectiles. This was not highlighted in the NTSB final report on the crash; the many holes and fractures consistent with being caused by projectiles originating from outside are very significant.

Regarding the two holes with high velocity characteristics mentioned above, all readers are urged to carefully review the official report, “TWA Flight 800 Analysis of Small Holes.” What the Popular Mechanics reporter does not reveal is that the NTSB investigator could not achieve high enough velocities to reproduce on test plates the holes found on TWA Flight 800 wreckage, even when firing test projectiles out of a gun. This means that whatever created the two holes on the TWA Flight 800 wreckage was created by something hitting it at a very high velocity—-a much higher velocity than the NTSB investigator was able to achieve during testing with a gun, a much higher velocity than the alleged low-velocity fuel-air explosion in the center wing tank and a much higher velocity than that at which the aircraft hit the water. . . .

Proximity-fused missiles do generate low velocity holes and impacts. Also, the reporter fails to mention spike tooth fractures found throughout the tank, which according to the NTSB, are created by a “high energy event.” These documented damage patterns are clear evidence of a high-energy event such as a missile warhead detonating at a distance from the aircraft (which is what proximity-fused missiles are designed to do)—-not from a low-velocity fuel-air explosion. (https://flight800doc.com/fact-checki...ar-mechanics/; see also http://iangoddard.com/twa800/03.htm).

-- The nose landing gear suffered severe concussive damage; damage that could not have been caused merely by the impact on the ocean. The terminal velocity of objects falling from TWA 800 to the sea would have been about 120-140 mph, not nearly fast enough to have done such marked structural damage to one of the toughest parts of the airliner. The nose landing gear compartment was 62 feet in front of the center wing tank, and numerous physical barriers and objects separated the two areas.

-- Over 100 witnesses said they saw an object streaking upward toward TWA 800 before it exploded. These witnesses were located in a wide range of locations, some on the beach, some farther inland, some in the air, and some on the ocean. Most of these witnesses used the word "flare," "firework," "streak," "rocket," or "missile" to describe the object.

The NTSB conducted a missile-visibility test in which people were positioned 2-12 miles away from the missile firing to approximate the locations of the TWA 800 missile witnesses. All of the participants in the test were able to see the missiles. (https://www.netowne.com/conspiracy/c...ess-study.html). (By the way, in the NTSB test, radar did not detect the missiles until they exploded.)

-- The FBI used a bogus CIA animation to try to explain what the witnesses saw, but the animation was so flawed that it was quickly abandoned and rarely mentioned again. CIA emails obtained via a FOIA lawsuit reveal that the CIA knew that both the radar tracking data and the black box data invalidated their animation. Some of these emails are shown in the Borjesson-Stalcup documentary TWA Flight 800.

-- The NTSB produced its own animation, but it was nearly as problematic as the CIA animation. The CIA animation featured a 3,000-foot "zoom climb" after the nose separated from the plane, while the NTSB animation featured a much more gradual and lower climb of 1,500 feet. Even the witnesses who were airborne said nothing about any kind of a climb but said the plane quickly began to drop. Most important, none of the radar data show a climb.

-- An audio expert discovered that the last four seconds of TWA 800’s Flight Data Recorder tape were erased (https://twa800.com/schulze/4secfinal.htm).

[sackett]

Mikegriffith1;14013204, tell us about all those people aboard the plane. Are they still dead?

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

Let's

...continue the frantic gallop.

Quote:

The nose landing gear compartment was 62 feet in front of the center wing tank, and numerous physical barriers and objects separated the two areas.

I already addressed this and you're just repeating the same charge you're cribbing from Donaldson's "report" without further comment.

You can be safely ignored.

[Axxman300]

Name the damned ship.

[MBDK]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

Let's review facts about TWA 800 and the NTSB investigation that are established by hard/physical evidence and/or that are too well documented to be credibly denied:

-- The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) investigative team rejected the NTSB’s theory about the crash and concluded (1) that the center wing tank explosion was not the initiating event, (2) that the initiating event was a “high-pressure event” that breached the fuselage, that this high-pressure event caused a structural failure in the area of Flight Station 854 to 860 on the lower left side of the aircraft, and (3) that this high-pressure event also caused the center wing tank explosion (IAMAW, Analysis and Recommendations Regarding TWA Flight 800, p. 9, https://twa800.com/iamaw/iamaw.pdf).

Once again, curiosity peaked in me to examine a bit of your "evidence", so I looked at the first thing you referenced. What struck me was the paper's section No. 9. This makes the conclusion that no witness observed the actual explosion, nor did they see any additional object near the aircraft around the time of the accident.

This is a completely opposite statement from your repeated accusation that dozens of witnesses saw a missile strike the aircraft. Do you now retract that claim, or are you going to continue to cherry-pick what you want as evidence and ignore anything that conflicts with your prejudiced presumptions? This is a critical question that requires an honest answer if you wish to be taken seriously in even the slightest manner.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by Axxman300

Name the damned ship.

You won't get the name of a ship from William Donaldson or any of the other Navy people that were in his little conspiracy club. My guess is that they know you can't just conjure up a phantom ship to shoot your missile. Ships have operational orders and logs and crews. Someone knows where every ship is all the time. So their theory is that TWA 800 was downed by a shoulder-fired missile, likely a FIM-92. They say this because these missiles are produced in huge numbers and have been sold all over the world. It's not hard to get your hands on one, and not hard to learn how to use it.

Now what Donaldson et al. won't tell you is how much the observed damage to TWA 800's airframe is utterly unlike a strike from a small, IR-homing missile. ARAP aimed their findings at a lay audience—Reed Irvine's audience, to be specific. When knowledgeable people say, "No, that doesn't seem plausible," the conspiracy rhetoric just writes them off as ill-informed or "biased." Everyone else is just supposed to say, "Ooh, what an impressive-sounding group of people you've managed to convene! Surely they must all know what they're talking about and we should take them seriously." When the theory inevitably fails on its merits, Irvine types can say, "See, it must be political because they're rejecting the expert whistleblowers."

The other thing ARAP wouldn't tell you is how unlikely it is that a single FIM-92 can bring down a Boeing 747. This is why they say there were two FIM-92s. But then this runs contrary to the eyewitness testimony. As much as they like to talk about a hundred witnesses, none of them saw anything consistent with two missile tracks and two missile strikes. The exhaust plume from a FIM-92 isn't visible from the side for more than a few hundred meters at night, and visible only as a point of light from behind for somewhat farther away than that. When witnesses some 30 km away are reporting seeing what others will later declare to be the incandescent exhaust trail of a missile, this is simply not at all consistent with the use of the FIM-92 missile.

There isn't a single "missile theory" from the conspiracy theorists. There are several disparate and inconsistent missile theories—none of them able to do a better job of explaining the totality of evidence than the conventional narrative. Thomas Stalcup's candidate missile is the much larger SM-2. It's certainly big enough to take down a very large airframe. And its plume will be visible from farther away (still not 30 km). But the launch platform and preparations are non-trivial. Stalcup has to find a ship; Donaldson doesn't.

Stalcup has no military experience, let alone any Navy experience. He's still stuck in the world of a bad thriller novel where some guy on a ship can just idly push a button to fire a million-dollar missile, hit an airliner accidentally, say ominously "Oops, nobody saw anything," and this actually succeeds. His big thrill is having eked out of the Dept. of Defense a set of documents pertaining to a largely irrelevant live-fire exercise from months prior to TWA 800. Since he managed to convince a judge that those documents should have been released according to a previous FOIA request, he's now emboldened to sue the aerospace industry so that he can get more views for his video and more speaking engagements. Because being a real physicist is really boring.

As usual with conspiracy theories, here too there is no coherent, parsimonious alternative theory. The best you get is a pile of nitpicks against the conventional narrative followed by a pile of speculation postured to explain a few cherry-picked outlying facts without providing any better overall picture of what happened. And as I wrote before, this is a well-known two-step designed to conceal a double standard. First the conspiracy theorist says, "You have to reject the mainstream narrative because it's too full of holes." Then they say, "You have to consider my theory no matter how full of holes it is; because we've eliminated the 'impossible,' now you have to entertain the highly improbable."

And because different conspiracy theories cherry-pick different allegedly bellwether outliers, you get a plethora of incompatible lines drawn "plausibly" in all different directions. This is why Mike carefully tells us he doesn't care about the details of "the missile theory." As soon as he picks one theory and sticks with it, he can't deploy both Stalcup and Donaldson because they refute each other. And then Mike would have to contend with making an affirmative case for a single narrative, none of which is supported by the totality of evidence.

This two-step dance is usually aimed at impressing lay people who don't know the relevant sciences, and who conveniently haven't been given a full set of facts (especially the ones the conspiracy theory doesn't explain.) When well-informed experts come along and say, "Well, no, this really doesn't supply a better explanation," the conspiracy theorist shifts to a full-court press at discrediting them. He might politicize the opinion: "All you NTSB-defenders...!" Or he might pivot on what makes facts important: "You obviously don't know as much about the outlying claims as I do." Or he might pivot on what constitutes relevant expertise: "You aren't really an expert unless you've done all the things that my conspiracy sources have done."

Specifically, all this is aimed at deceiving people into thinking the conspiracy proponent is so much better informed, so much more politically astute, so much more the free thinker. I can understand and approve of people wanting to be seen as great in others' eyes. But when you're doing it at others' expense, there should be some resistance to that. The conspiracy theory here accuses real people of real wrongdoing. To some of us, investigating engineering mishaps is not just a political or psychological game. We have no patience for armchair detectives, political hacks, or failed scientists trying to grow their YouTube presence.

[Axxman300]

I think the only large transport plane, or "heavy" shot down by a Stinger was a Soviet Antonov. But they hit it on takeoff (at Kabul, I think) which is at a higher altitude than JFK, and is considered a lucky shot. At the altitude TWA-800 was flying when the fuel tank cut loose, had it been a Stinger-type warhead, the plane would have been able to turn around, dump fuel, and land.

And Mike knows this, that's why he pushes the Navy SAM theory for the larger warhead.

And yes, you're right about Navy crews talking. In 1964, anyone who read the newspapers knew that the USS Maddox incident had been over-blown by LBJ because the Saigon press corps was waiting when the ship returned to the harbor to interview the crew, and tour the ship. Somewhere in the early 1970s the Gulf of Tonkin incident evolved into a CT which claimed the American people had been kept in the dark about the events of that night. Today with Nexis, people can read those articles from 1964/65.