New TWA Flight 800 film coming out

[mikegriffith1]

Originally Posted by bknight

From NTSB final report.

https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/...ts/aar0003.pdf
pages 112-114
From page 112

After a discussion of tests made by Boeing on impact hole of low velocity.(pgs112-113)

So this tells me that 2 holes "could" have been created from high impact velocity, bomb or warhead. The other holes were low velocity impact. So, CTs are basing part of their theory on two holes? It seems to me that a preponderance of the holes would be high velocity, if a missile was involved.

One, the segment you quoted from the NTSB report is not talking about the two holes that Speer discusses in his affidavit. The NTSB report ignored those two holes.

Two, the TWA 800 Project has answered the NTSB's claims about the fuselage holes, and I quoted a large portion of their response in a previous reply. Here's a link to one of the TWA 800 Project's fact-check articles that includes their reply to the NTSB claims about the fuselage holes:

https://flight800doc.com/fact-checki...lar-mechanics/

[mikegriffith1]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Axxman300:

My reading of the report, and knowing the true history of the event I can tell you the FBI wanted to find evidence of a bomb or a Stinger missile as the cause of TWA-800's crash.

These erroneous arguments indicate you’ve only read one side of the story, that you haven’t read any research that challenges what you want to believe.

First of all, Kallstrom was the one who insisted on looking only for evidence of a Stinger-type missile or a bomb in terms of manmade explosives. He refused to consider the possibility of a proximity-fused missile.

If you had bothered to read the ARAP report, you would know that ARAP did not posit Stinger missiles. Yes, Donaldson and some others initially believed that the missiles may have been MANPAD/shoulder-fired missiles, such as the Stinger missile, but they later rejected this view. The ARAP report explains why MANPADs could not have been involved and argues that the missiles were proximity-fused anti-air missiles, some of which could have been fired from a small vessel relatively easily (ARAP report, p. 36; cf. p. 11).

Second, soon after Kallstrom met with Gorelick in late August 1996, Kallstrom shut down all serious talk of a bomb or missile. Yes, until that point, the FBI personnel in the investigation, seeing the many clear indications of a manmade explosion, were pursuing evidence along that line. But, that came to a rather sudden halt after Gorelick summoned Kallstrom to Washington in late August 1996.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Axxman300:

Bro. Here's another cool story: Boeing conducted those tests for the NTSB. So if they had a problem, why didn't they address the NTSB at the time? You've implied that Boeing is a helpless victim in this story, yet they did a bulk of the fuel tank work.

One, are you ever going to deal with the facts presented by the Boeing engineers in the Boeing TWA 800 report regarding the NTSB’s ridiculous short-circuit-spark theory? Or are you just going to keep asking evasive polemical questions?

Two, plenty of investigators in the investigation did raise objections to the NTSB at the time, but the NTSB ignored them (or kicked them off the investigation), just as the NTSB ignored the information in the Boeing report about the problems with the short-circuit-spark theory.

We’ll revisit the Boeing report in just a minute.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Axxman300:

The US Navy can tell you where all of their ships were at the time of the crash. Fleet Numerical would have had that then, and would be copied through them into archives. Surface fleet movement doesn't stay classified beyond 20 years.

If you would bother to do some balanced research, you would discover that the information on the Navy ships in the area that night is still classified, despite FOIA efforts to obtain it. Similarly, a lot of other vital information, such as the satellite data for the area that night, is still inexcusably classified, despite FOIA efforts to obtain it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Axxman300:

Let's see, if I recall 6th grade science class. Aircraft like the 747 are designed to take a direct hit from lighting. I think they called it "grounding", where the massive electrical charge is channeled through the airframe safely. Not sure, but I don't think the FAA will approve the airframe for commercial sale.

Really? Is this really your argument? You simply ignored the fact that we know that energy from that lightning strike passed through the center wing tank and through three other tanks--yet, gee, no explosion. Yes, 747s have grounding, but the grounding did not prevent the lightning strike from sending electricity through four fuel tanks, including the center wing tank. And, by the way, did that electricity enter the center wing tank via the FQIS wiring?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Axxman300:

See, lightning comes from the OUTSIDE of the airplane. The short-circuit that cause the explosion came from INSIDE the tank.

Uh, NO, that is not the NTSB theory. The NTSB theory is that the short circuit occurred outside the center wing tank and then generated a spark that entered the tank via FQIS wiring (NTSB report, p. xvi). How can you not know this? Have you even read the NTSB report?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Axxman300:

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 of molecules together and vibrate them at just the right speed, or frequency, they will create their own electrical charges, one positive and one negative.

This is a “6th- and 7th-grade” faulty argument. This is not the NTSB theory, either. The NTSB considered the possibility of a static charge and rejected it. The NTSB tested a clamp inside the tank because it was judged to be the most vulnerable object in the tank to generate a static charge, but the clamp did not accumulate enough static electricity to discharge more than 0.0095 mJ of energy into the fuel. The NTSB realized that the short circuit would have had to occur outside the tank because the FQIS wiring did not carry more than 0.02 millijoules (mJ) of energy, which was less than 10% of the energy needed to ignite vapors in the tank. Again, have you even read the NTSB report?

Why do you suppose there has never, ever, ever been a formal determination, i.e., an official finding based on hard evidence, that any Boeing aircraft has had a center wing tank explode from an internal cause? It never happened before TWA 800 and it hasn’t happened since TWA 800. It didn’t happen with TWA 800, either.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Axxman300:

On any other aircraft that day this wouldn't have been a problem, but 800 had damaged wiring with its own electrical charge passing through.

There is not a shred of evidence that the FQIS wiring was damaged. As the IAMAW report notes, the recovered wiring “does not exhibit any evidence of improper maintenance or any malfunction that led to a spark or other discrepancy” (IAMAW report, p. 4). The Boeing report notes the following:

No evidence was found to support a conclusion that a specific electrical system or component of the 747-100 fuel quantity indicating system (FQIS) ignited a fuel/air explosion and initiated an event sequence such as the one suspected in the TWA 800 accident. The 747-100 FQIS is designed specifically to preclude fuel tank vapor ignition. . . . Rigorous initial qualification testing by Boeing and its suppliers demonstrated regulatory compliance. Boeing has thoroughly tested the FQIS system as part of the NTSB accident investigation without detecting electrical event conditions that would cause an explosion aboard TWA 800. . . .

There was no evidence of electrical stress on any components in the recovered indicators. The CWT indicator was disassembled and the components were inspected and analyzed. All component damage was attributed to either high impact or saltwater contamination. None of the parts failed due to an electrical stress. In fact, some parts were fully operational once the salt contamination was removed. . . .

From inspections and tests of the flight deck fuel quantity indicators conducted by the NTSB as part of the accident investigation, there was no evidence of a failure or damage found that would contribute to, or be evidence of, excessive energy being introduced into the center fuel tank of the accident airplane. (Submission to the National Transportation Safety Board for the TWA 800 Investigation from The Boeing Company, April 28, 2000, pp. A-3, A-4).

And I’m reasonably certain that at least some of the Boeing experts were not Clinton-hating conservatives.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trebuchet:

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 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?

This argument does not work. Boeing only made those improvements after being ordered to do so by the FAA, and the FAA did not issue those regulations until 12 years after the crash; moreover, the regulations exempted numerous kinds of fuel tanks. So, obviously, this was not really viewed as a serious problem—it certainly was not treated like one. The TWA 800 Project provides more information on this issue:

The FAA’s fuel tank inerting rule came out in 2008, twelve years after TWA Flight 800’s demise, indicating that it was not an urgent necessity but an additional precautionary measure triggered by the NTSB’s probable cause finding (which is unproven) and public pressure. Even though last year the FAA proposed a civil penalty of $13.57 million against Boeing for “failing to meet a deadline to submit service instructions that would enable airlines to further reduce the risk of fuel tank explosions,” the size of the fine and the fact that the FAA did not immediately press for retrofitting all aircraft with nitrogen gas systems right after the probable cause determination was made in TWA Flight 800’s case, indicates that exploding fuel tanks are not a significant safety problem.

Even now, this rule does not apply to cargo jets, no matter what size they are, and it only requires that aircraft manufactured after 1992 be retrofitted. The majority of 757s and early 767s were built before that time.

Also, the rule does not apply to wing tanks, only tanks in the fuselage even though two of the NTSB’s examples of fuel tank fires (Pan Am 707 in 1963 and an Iranian Air Force 747 in 1976) were wingtip lightning strikes. The rule also does not apply to foreign registered aircraft and only to Airbus and Boeing models that are US registered. It does not apply to former McDonnell Douglas MD80, MD90, MD11 and 717 models. The airlines fought the implementation of this rule before and since its publication. The rule may slightly improve safety, but this has yet to be proven. (“Fact Checking: Popular Mechanics,” TWA 800 Project, 2013, https://flight800doc.com/fact-checki...lar-mechanics/)

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by Hellbound

Also wanted to second Jay’s point about AA missiles. The “hot jet of high explosive gas” is how HEAT warheads work, and those generally require contact with the target and are designed to defeat thick armor. To my knowledge, no modern AA missile is contact fused; all that I’m familiar with are proximity-fused.

The AIM-54A is proximity-fused. The SM-2 is proximity-fused when used in air-intercept mode, and contact-fused when used in anti-shipping mode. The FIM-92 is contact-fused.

But the problem in all cases is that the bursting charges don't produce a "jet" of hot gas that can cut aluminum as Speer seems to expect. The job of the bursting charge is to expand (and necessarily cool) rapidly in a mostly spherical shape. More on this below. There is no "jet" of gas. It is a detonation wavefront, and it loses heat very rapidly as it expands, proportional to the square of the radius. The actual state equations for solid explosive are fairly complicated, but the bottom line is that the thermal effects of detonation in a fragmentation warhead are negligible.

Quote:

They don’t make contact with the target, instead they get close, explode, and pepper it with fragments. I’m no expert, mind, but was assigned to an ADA battalion in the US Army for two years. So I do have some idea where from I speak

Then you know why a HEAT round can't be gyrostabilized and must be fin-stabilized instead. In order to generate a jet of hot gas—one that remains focused on a small part of the target armor and also retains enough heat in the jet to cut the armor material—a shaped-charge design approach must be used. If the round were spun, it would fling much of its explosive away on contact from centrifugal force. The round has to remain mechanically intact for long enough that the geometry of the shaped charge produces the desired effect. A jet and a wave front are literally contradictory concepts.

Similarly, the bursting charge on fragmentation warheads that were coming into use in the 1990s was made not to expand uniformly in all directions. They don't explode in a sphere, but more akin to a cone. The same physics that rapidly cools a spherical detonation wave front also reduces the density of frags to where they don't cause enough damage. Our work in the MHIP project was to improve homing such that when the fuse tripped, the probability determination for where the target was—as function of spherical coordinates in the tracker coordinate system—would put the target in that cone.

Our colleagues in the companion warhead programs were devising methods of shaping that wave front and the fragmentation shell so that it would concentrate frags in those areas. But you still get a detonation wave front that expands and cools rapidly as a function of distance from the warhead core, just not quite as rapidly as for a spherical wave front. In no case, however, do you get a "jet" of flame that inflicts primary incision damage on the target.

This is literally the whole military science of warheads for the past 200 or so years. The normal thermal effects of the bursting charge have never been effective at destroying the target. The whole point has been harness the mechanical effect of a detonation in order to hurl fragments that inflict mechanical damage on the target.

The FIM-92 is only contact-fused, so you do get secondary blast damage from the bursting charge. This means in addition to the frags that ride along with the warhead, the structure around the detonation point is converted to blast fragments and propelled at high velocity. None of this is thermal incision, though. In fact, the desired effect is for the sheared fragments of structure to be entrained in the wave front, not cut in situ by it. The primary effect, however, is still expected to be from the onboard frags, and for a large target like a heavy airliner, the damage will be highly localized. You wouldn't be able to point to small holes in the structure of a target and say those were produced by the "jets of hot gas" from a FIM-92 fragmentation warhead, or from any air-intercept warhead. That's just astoundingly wrong.

The AIM-54A used a continuous-rod warhead. These were developed in response to the shortcomings of spherical fragmentation warheads. A CR warhead works by an ingenious arrangement of metal rods welded at alternate ends. Imagine something vaguely like the pantographic toddler gates, only with one end wrapping around to join with the other. What you get there is an expanding ring of continuous metal that slices through aircraft structure. As you say, a typical fragmentation warhead "peppers" its target, and that may not enough to inflict fatal damage. The result of a properly-deployed CR warhead is that your one airplane suddenly becomes two half-airplanes.

The departure of TWA 800's nose section from the rest of the fuselage initially led the early missile theory proponents to conclude that only a CR warhead could have produced that effect. That's as may be, but the problem is that the conspiracy theorists ignorantly point to holes and claim this is evidence of a warhead detonation. You can only claim this if it's a fragmentation warhead.

This is why you have to pick a story and stick with it through examining all the evidence. If your presentation is that Missile A launched by Agent A can explain certain parts of the evidence, but other parts are inconsistent with it, and that Missile B launched by Agent B explains those other parts but not the first part, you don't get to just combine scenarios A and B and say you've come up with a better theory.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

One, the segment you quoted from the NTSB report is not talking about the two holes that Speer discusses in his affidavit.

Speer's opinion of what must have caused those holes is astoundingly, egregiously ignorant.

[bknight]

Originally Posted by JayUtah

Correct; in the aft equipment bay in the uppermost, rearmost section of the pressurized cabin.

Once the forward part of the jet containing the instrumentation was severed the data to the FDR and CVR being recorded. mikegriffith1 parrots a view that the plane did not ascend, but the last commands that the crew made were to climb to 15000, IIMC. So, a loss of a lot of mass from the front part of the aircraft that is already ascending would continue to ascend until it stalls out. I see nothing irregular in that determination.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

Really? Is this really your argument? You simply ignored the fact that we know that energy from that lightning strike passed through the center wing tank and through three other tanks--yet, gee, no explosion.

Yes, that's how it works. Energy is directed through known paths so that it does not arc.

Quote:

Yes, 747s have grounding, but the grounding did not prevent the lightning strike from sending electricity through four fuel tanks, including the center wing tank.

The point is not to direct energy away from the fuel tanks. The point is to direct energy through the metal tank structure, if necessary, along a path designed not to allow for arcs. The problem comes when energy travels along unplanned paths and has an opportunity to arc.

There is no problem with electrical current is running through a metal structure that's adjacent to a flammable or explosive material. As long as it doesn't arc, there is no ignition. As long as the current doesn't heat the metal to the ignition temperature of the adjacent material, there is no ignition. The problem comes from unplanned current paths. The planned paths can certainly include the tanks themselves.

This how we know the conspiracy theory is aimed at creating doubt in a lay audience, not actually investigating the cause of a mishap. The theory propounded by alleged experts instead plays on the lay person's likely misunderstanding.

Maybe you should not try to be an engineer. You're exceptionally bad at it.

[Axxman300]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

These erroneous arguments indicate you’ve only read one side of the story, that you haven’t read any research that challenges what you want to believe.

First of all, Kallstrom was the one who insisted on looking only for evidence of a Stinger-type missile or a bomb in terms of manmade explosives. He refused to consider the possibility of a proximity-fused missile.

If you had bothered to read the ARAP report, you would know that ARAP did not posit Stinger missiles. Yes, Donaldson and some others initially believed that the missiles may have been MANPAD/shoulder-fired missiles, such as the Stinger missile, but they later rejected this view. The ARAP report explains why MANPADs could not have been involved and argues that the missiles were proximity-fused anti-air missiles, some of which could have been fired from a small vessel relatively easily (ARAP report, p. 36; cf. p. 11).

I'll work backwards.

1. ARAP is crap. Crap-oloa. Dog Doo. Butt-hurt anti-Clinton rantings thinly as poorly conducted research. I read through it. I suggest reading it with the theme to Benny Hill (Yakety Sax) on your headphones.

2. The FBI doesn't do crash investigations unless there is initial cause to believe a bomb was on the aircraft. The fact that the FBI stuck with the investigation instead of washing their hands was a direct result of ongoing allegations and rabbit-holes based on "eye-witness" reporting. They never quit working the bomb or explosives line of investigation until it was clear the failure was mechanical in nature.

Much of the ARAP butt-hurt comes from the fact that the FBI does play nice while conducting investigation. Fragile engineer and pilot egos wilting under the Federal heat. NTSB speaks engineer and pilot, the FBI does not.

Quote:

Second, soon after Kallstrom met with Gorelick in late August 1996, Kallstrom shut down all serious talk of a bomb or missile. Yes, until that point, the FBI personnel in the investigation, seeing the many clear indications of a manmade explosion, were pursuing evidence along that line. But, that came to a rather sudden halt after Gorelick summoned Kallstrom to Washington in late August 1996.

Oooh, spooky...or maybe they shut it down because there was no evidence of a bomb or missile.

Quote:

One, are you ever going to deal with the facts presented by the Boeing engineers in the Boeing TWA 800 report regarding the NTSB’s ridiculous short-circuit-spark theory? Or are you just going to keep asking evasive polemical questions?

And yet it was Boening which conducted the experiments, and confirmed the wiring issue.

And as a former Conspiracy Theorist, I refuse to play your game. All you have is bad science from unqualified people with political axes to grind, and a handful of conspiracy books to quote from. What you view as polemical question are just me asking why your claims are not sustained by history and common sense.

Quote:

Two, plenty of investigators in the investigation did raise objections to the NTSB at the time, but the NTSB ignored them (or kicked them off the investigation), just as the NTSB ignored the information in the Boeing report about the problems with the short-circuit-spark theory.

And yet once the wiring issue in the fuel tank became the cause, multiple airliners were found to have the same issues in their center fuel tanks. Moreover, today the wiring is inspected as part of standard maintenance. I wonder why that is?

Quote:

If you would bother to do some balanced research, you would discover that the information on the Navy ships in the area that night is still classified, despite FOIA efforts to obtain it. Similarly, a lot of other vital information, such as the satellite data for the area that night, is still inexcusably classified, despite FOIA efforts to obtain it.

Neat. How many FOIA requests have been submitted, and when was the last one? What exactly was the request for? What about radar records from JFK, Republic, Newark, and Linden? They aren't classified, what did their radar records show?

Quote:

Really? Is this really your argument? You simply ignored the fact that we know that energy from that lightning strike passed through the center wing tank and through three other tanks--yet, gee, no explosion. Yes, 747s have grounding, but the grounding did not prevent the lightning strike from sending electricity through four fuel tanks, including the center wing tank. And, by the way, did that electricity enter the center wing tank via the FQIS wiring?

That's the great thing about 6th-grade science, it was easy to understand, and this allows me to point out you have a big fat nothing-burger with this one.

Quote:

Uh, NO, that is not the NTSB theory. The NTSB theory is that the short circuit occurred outside the center wing tank and then generated a spark that entered the tank via FQIS wiring (NTSB report, p. xvi). How can you not know this? Have you even read the NTSB report?

I really don't care. There was no missile. You're just low-hanging fruit.

Quote:

This is a “6th- and 7th-grade” faulty argument. This is not the NTSB theory, either. The NTSB considered the possibility of a static charge and rejected it. The NTSB tested a clamp inside the tank because it was judged to be the most vulnerable object in the tank to generate a static charge, but the clamp did not accumulate enough static electricity to discharge more than 0.0095 mJ of energy into the fuel. The NTSB realized that the short circuit would have had to occur outside the tank because the FQIS wiring did not carry more than 0.02 millijoules (mJ) of energy, which was less than 10% of the energy needed to ignite vapors in the tank. Again, have you even read the NTSB report?

Yes, the center fuel tank exploded. I don't need to know why.

Quote:

Why do you suppose there has never, ever, ever been a formal determination, i.e., an official finding based on hard evidence, that any Boeing aircraft has had a center wing tank explode from an internal cause? It never happened before TWA 800 and it hasn’t happened since TWA 800. It didn’t happen with TWA 800, either.

That's easy, hard evidence is a CT pipe-dream/straw-man/line of BS.

Oh, and I can think of eight dead people from a fuel-tank explosion in the Philippines in 1990 who would point out how wrong you are about this kind of thing never happening before:

https://www.baaa-acro.com/crash/grou...anila-8-killed

...or since:

https://www.seattlepi.com/business/a...nk-1204311.php

Which resulted in this:

https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/l...-faa-issues-ad

So you're wrong about fuel-tank explosions not being a thing. Seems more like there was a good chance TWA-800 could have cooked off at the terminal.

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This argument does not work. Boeing only made those improvements after being ordered to do so by the FAA, and the FAA did not issue those regulations until 12 years after the crash; moreover, the regulations exempted numerous kinds of fuel tanks. So, obviously, this was not really viewed as a serious problem—it certainly was not treated like one. The TWA 800 Project provides more information on this issue:

...By Boeing, and it took eight additional deaths to get them to move on the problem. And their recent track record is even worse. The FAA is subject to influence by Congress, and by proxy the aviation industry and airlines. You ignore actual "conspiratorial" interference by government working on behalf of private industry while pushing a ridiculous theory about a sea-launched missile

There have been 17 fuel-tank explosions of one kind or another:

https://www.aviationtoday.com/2001/0...nk-explosions/

Three fitting the model we saw with TWA-800.

Just because the airlines and aviation industry don't think fuel-tank explosions are a big risk is pretty much why the fuel-tanks exploded. TWA and Boening gambled with the lives of millions of passengers. Flight 800 got the short straw...man...

[bknight]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

One, the segment you quoted from the NTSB report is not talking about the two holes that Speer discusses in his affidavit. The NTSB report ignored those two holes.

I clearly asked for images and you ignored those requests and now present this viewpoint. How does anyone determine whether or not the holes are different? Only your word and that isn't good enough.

Quote:

Two, the TWA 800 Project has answered the NTSB's claims about the fuselage holes, and I quoted a large portion of their response in a previous reply. Here's a link to one of the TWA 800 Project's fact-check articles that includes their reply to the NTSB claims about the fuselage holes:

https://flight800doc.com/fact-checki...lar-mechanics/

If as you indicate that were visible signs of cracking, then why haven't more and other individuals noted the same? Oh I remember the NTSB "prevented such examination", for 30 years?. Why don't you present links to investigators that were prevented from making such evaluations, the news hounds would have been all over this, yet no such reports exist. Why? Further no one has taken credit for this dastardly act in the 30 years, why would a anyone believe that there was such an individual and the deed done.

[mikegriffith1]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bknight:

mikegriffith1 you make the damage by high explosives and yet you don't produce the photographic images only citing CTs reports. Since you have laboriously continued to state such "evidence" why not post the images?

Well, let’s be honest: We both know that you’re really not interested in the facts, that your mind is closed shut on this subject, which is why you keep making these silly comments.

As a matter of fact, I have not cited only “CTs reports,” unless you consider affidavits by former crash investigators who participated in the NTSB investigation to be “CTs reports.” I’ve also cited FOIA-released CIA and FBI documents. Are those “CTs reports” too?

Anyway, I have cited several sources that contain numerous pictures of the kind you say you want to see. The ARAP report, which I’ve linked in previous replies, contains a number of those pictures. The problem here is that you have not read anything that challenges your belief about the crash. If you had, you would have already seen those pictures.

Have you read the ARAP report yet? How about any of the other links I’ve provided? Obviously, the answer is NO, or else you would have already seen those pictures.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Axxman300:

The wreck sat in an NTSB hangar for 20 years. You'd think someone would have noticed and confirmed. Weird.

Seriously? If you had gathered up the objectivity to read the other side of the story, you would know how sophomoric this argument is. If you had done some balanced research, you would know that well over a hundred pieces of wreckage were never returned by the FBI; you would know that untold numbers of pieces of wreckage were removed from the hangar without authorization; you would know that after a number of pieces had disappeared from the hangar, FBI agents were caught, on video, removing more pieces from the hangar; you would know that a number of the pieces in the hangar were markedly altered, such as the center wing tank’s floor; among other things.

It is obvious that you have not even read the NTSB report. You didn’t even know that the NTSB claimed that the alleged short circuit (for which they could find no ignition source) occurred outside the center wing tank.

Personally, I would never get on an online forum and discuss a controversial issue without at least reading a few sources from each side. But that's just me.

I think this is a good time to present an interesting, enlightening article on TWA 800 by Andrew Danziger, a former airline pilot who was one of the pilots who flew Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign:

Was TWA Flight 800 shot out of the sky?

As a former pilot, that is a question I get asked about all the time.

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but let's be clear: Yes. I say it was. And I believe the FBI covered it up.

There are many reasons to disbelieve the official explanation of what happened to TWA 800 almost 19 years ago, on July 17, 1996, off the South Shore of Long Island. There's hardly an airline pilot among the hundreds I know who buys the official explanation — that it was a fuel-tank explosion — offered by the National Transportation Safety Board some four years later.

Lots can go wrong with an airplane. Engines can fail; they can catch fire. Devices can malfunction. Pilots make errors.

But jets do not explode in midair.

If they do, it's usually because they've been shot down or bombed. There's little to suggest that there was a bomb onboard, but there is ample evidence that a missile of some sort detonated in the air very close to the plane and brought it down.

A former colleague, who will remain unnamed because he was not authorized to speak publicly about this, served as one of the lead investigators representing the interests of the TWA pilots, and I talked to him at length about the investigation after it was completed.

I have also spoken with another former TWA employee, who has knowledge of what went on in the aftermath of the crash.

How the investigation was conducted — and what my colleague said he witnessed, not to mention the scores of conflicting eyewitness accounts of the crash — has led me to believe that whatever sent Flight 800 to its fiery demise could not have been a fuel tank explosion.

The accident was officially attributed to the explosion of fuel vapors in an empty center fuel tank, probably ignited by a spark from a faulty fuel quantity probe inside the tank. The probe wiring is bundled at points with some lighting circuit wires.

Investigators determined there was a crack in the insulation, which allowed high voltage from the lighting circuitry to create a spark that ignited the vapors in the empty tank.

I have a problem with this theory.

The probes that measure fuel quantity were recovered from the bottom of the ocean during the salvage effort. They were cleaned, and they all passed stringent tests.

There wasn't a single piece of cracked insulation in the 159 miles of wire recovered in the investigation.

Conveniently, lengths of wire where the cracks were imagined to exist were supposedly among the 16 miles of wire that weren't recovered. I say supposedly for good reason.

According to my colleague who worked for TWA, the mechanics and their representatives were denied access, in the early going, to the hangar where all of the recovered material was stored and being re-assembled.

And there's this: During the investigation, the FBI periodically required everyone to leave the hangar due to "national security issues." Only after they "sterilized the area" were folks allowed back in to continue where they left off (that is, if what they were examining was still there).

This happened time after time, my colleague said.

Remember, airplanes just don't blow up in-flight. The claim that an empty center fuel tank exploded doesn't pass the sniff test.

There are about 45,000 big jet airplane departures every day in the U.S., and most of those planes fly around with empty center fuel tanks while the main wing tanks, which always start off with fuel, are nearly depleted upon landing.

Since the first American jetliner entered into service in 1958 — some 38 years before the loss of TWA Flight 800 — airliners were flying around with empty or near-empty fuel tanks.

Just doing some simple arithmetic, hundreds of millions of flights flew around the U.S. between 1958 and 1996 and never exploded in midair because a combustible mix of fuel vapors triggered an explosion in the center fuel tank.

That's just in the U.S.; if we account for all the flying in the world during that timeframe, that would be well north of 1 billion flights in which there wasn't a single in-flight explosion.

So what actually happened on that horrific day?

Here's what we know for sure, according to documents and other reports:

TWA was one of the pre-eminent legacy airlines of its day, with a well-deserved reputation of having some of the highest quality pilots, best-trained mechanics and well-maintained aircraft.

The TWA 800 aircraft was a 747-100 model, built and delivered in 1971. At the time of the accident the aircraft was 25 years old, by no means a spring chicken but not old compared to the average fleet age of 747s used at TWA and other major airlines.

Airplanes undergo continuous inspections and maintenance as approved by government regulators, and can be kept safe and airworthy for a great many years. You might be shocked to learn the actual age of the airplane on which you're flying.

The Flight 800 aircraft had arrived at JFK a few hours earlier from Athens, Greece. The pilots reported a few minor glitches upon arrival in Athens and their subsequent return to New York, but those mechanical irregularities were all addressed.

After some routine servicing and normal repair work, the aircraft took off for Paris, France, with 230 passengers, including four pilots and 14 flight attendants. Less than 15 minutes after departure, the plane exploded just off East Moriches on Long Island.

When it happened, the plane was climbing out of about 13,700 feet — about right for its location, considering its weight and the time from takeoff. It was on a heavily traveled departure path and was trailed by airliners also headed for an Atlantic crossing.

Pilots are used to looking at other airplanes in flight. It would be hard for a pilot to misidentify something rising up from the water, climbing almost 14,000 feet into the air and striking an aircraft that was flying between 10 and 40 miles in front of them. It would be equally difficult to miss something that was just falling out of the sky, on fire, after exploding in flight for no apparent reason.

After the explosion, more than three dozen witnesses reported they'd seen contrails going up into the sky towards the plane; 18 of those people said they saw something coming up from the water, rising to meet the plane.

The FBI only summarized the interviews in its reports; the witnesses weren't permitted to see what was written or to review the reports, and the NTSB only received summary reports in which all personal information was redacted. And maybe most importantly, the witnesses — there were more than 700 of them — weren't permitted to testify.

Among those witnesses were people who attended a wedding on a beach in the Moriches, which was in progress at the time of the explosion. Some of them were recording the ceremony, their cameras trained on the wedding party with the ocean and sky in the background. Many of these people witnessed the explosion, and some said they saw something rising from the water.

During the investigation, holes were discovered in parts of the aircraft skin that penetrated from outside in — evidence that an object, most likely a missile — had struck the plane. But when investigators began photographing that evidence, according to my former colleague who was there, the FBI told them to stop.

Normally, air crash investigations in the United States are led by the National Transportation Safety Board. It is standard procedure to have investigators present who represent all of the interested parties: the NTSB and Federal Aviation Administration, the airline, the pilots union, the mechanics and the manufacturer of the airframe, engines and aircraft components.

The FBI's presence on the investigation team was unusual in any fashion, but for the agency to take the lead was unprecedented.

The salvage effort and investigation took four years, with painstaking study of every recovered piece of evidence, no matter how small.

All of the recovered pieces were reassembled back into an airplane like a giant jigsaw puzzle. After all of that, the FAA issued a recommendation that pilots turn off the center tank fuel pumps before the tank runs completely dry, to avoid a similar "malfunction."

Airlines were given years to put in a simple and inexpensive system that automatically shut down the fuel pumps when the tanks ran dry.

Yet the fuel pump itself was never implicated in the Flight 800 catastrophe.
Which leaves us with many more questions than answers.

To wit, why was the FBI, as my investigator colleague has suggested, obstructing investigators from doing their job? What did the feds find about this accident that elevated it to the level a "national security interest?"

Was it a terrorist attack — a precursor to 9/11, as has been widely suggested — or a U.S. military training exercise gone wrong?

Sadly, we might never know. But as an experienced commercial pilot, I know this much: Planes do not blow up by themselves. I firmly believe that this plane was shot down. I also believe my friend when he says the FBI imposed limits on what investigators could and couldn't analyze.

With that said: If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. Or bull.

This investigation smelled like bull all those years back, and time has done nothing to soften that stench. I don't believe the findings, and neither do hundreds of other pilots that I know.

Andrew Danziger is a 28-year airline veteran, with experience in turboprops and Boeing aircraft. He was an international 757/767 captain for the last 14 years. He has served as an airline ground school instructor and check pilot in both simulators and aircraft and was one of the pilots to fly Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign. (“Former Obama Pilot: TWA Flight 800 Was Not Blown Up By A Faulty Fuel Tank; It Was Shot Down. I’ll Always Believe That, And Here’s Why,” New York Daily News, April 15, 2015, https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york...icle-1.2186329)

[KDLarsen]

In short: A rehash of the usual talking points, which we're supposed to accept because he's a pilot. Big deal.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

Well, let’s be honest...

Why start now? Have you figured out yet why nobody in the relevant industries ever found any of your sources credible or helpful?

[bknight]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

Well, let’s be honest: We both know that you’re really not interested in the facts, that your mind is closed shut on this subject, which is why you keep making these silly comments.

As a matter of fact, I have not cited only “CTs reports,” unless you consider affidavits by former crash investigators who participated in the NTSB investigation to be “CTs reports.” I’ve also cited FOIA-released CIA and FBI documents. Are those “CTs reports” too?

Anyway, I have cited several sources that contain numerous pictures of the kind you say you want to see. The ARAP report, which I’ve linked in previous replies, contains a number of those pictures. The problem here is that you have not read anything that challenges your belief about the crash. If you had, you would have already seen those pictures.

Have you read the ARAP report yet? How about any of the other links I’ve provided? Obviously, the answer is NO, or else you would have already seen those pictures.



Seriously? If you had gathered up the objectivity to read the other side of the story, you would know how sophomoric this argument is. If you had done some balanced research, you would know that well over a hundred pieces of wreckage were never returned by the FBI; you would know that untold numbers of pieces of wreckage were removed from the hangar without authorization; you would know that after a number of pieces had disappeared from the hangar, FBI agents were caught, on video, removing more pieces from the hangar; you would know that a number of the pieces in the hangar were markedly altered, such as the center wing tank’s floor; among other things.

It is obvious that you have not even read the NTSB report. You didn’t even know that the NTSB claimed that the alleged short circuit (for which they could find no ignition source) occurred outside the center wing tank.

Personally, I would never get on an online forum and discuss a controversial issue without at least reading a few sources from each side. But that's just me.

I think this is a good time to present an interesting, enlightening article on TWA 800 by Andrew Danziger, a former airline pilot who was one of the pilots who flew Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign:

Was TWA Flight 800 shot out of the sky?

As a former pilot, that is a question I get asked about all the time.

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but let's be clear: Yes. I say it was. And I believe the FBI covered it up.

There are many reasons to disbelieve the official explanation of what happened to TWA 800 almost 19 years ago, on July 17, 1996, off the South Shore of Long Island. There's hardly an airline pilot among the hundreds I know who buys the official explanation — that it was a fuel-tank explosion — offered by the National Transportation Safety Board some four years later.

Lots can go wrong with an airplane. Engines can fail; they can catch fire. Devices can malfunction. Pilots make errors.

But jets do not explode in midair.

If they do, it's usually because they've been shot down or bombed. There's little to suggest that there was a bomb onboard, but there is ample evidence that a missile of some sort detonated in the air very close to the plane and brought it down.

A former colleague, who will remain unnamed because he was not authorized to speak publicly about this, served as one of the lead investigators representing the interests of the TWA pilots, and I talked to him at length about the investigation after it was completed.

I have also spoken with another former TWA employee, who has knowledge of what went on in the aftermath of the crash.

How the investigation was conducted — and what my colleague said he witnessed, not to mention the scores of conflicting eyewitness accounts of the crash — has led me to believe that whatever sent Flight 800 to its fiery demise could not have been a fuel tank explosion.

The accident was officially attributed to the explosion of fuel vapors in an empty center fuel tank, probably ignited by a spark from a faulty fuel quantity probe inside the tank. The probe wiring is bundled at points with some lighting circuit wires.

Investigators determined there was a crack in the insulation, which allowed high voltage from the lighting circuitry to create a spark that ignited the vapors in the empty tank.

I have a problem with this theory.

The probes that measure fuel quantity were recovered from the bottom of the ocean during the salvage effort. They were cleaned, and they all passed stringent tests.

There wasn't a single piece of cracked insulation in the 159 miles of wire recovered in the investigation.

Conveniently, lengths of wire where the cracks were imagined to exist were supposedly among the 16 miles of wire that weren't recovered. I say supposedly for good reason.

According to my colleague who worked for TWA, the mechanics and their representatives were denied access, in the early going, to the hangar where all of the recovered material was stored and being re-assembled.

And there's this: During the investigation, the FBI periodically required everyone to leave the hangar due to "national security issues." Only after they "sterilized the area" were folks allowed back in to continue where they left off (that is, if what they were examining was still there).

This happened time after time, my colleague said.

Remember, airplanes just don't blow up in-flight. The claim that an empty center fuel tank exploded doesn't pass the sniff test.

There are about 45,000 big jet airplane departures every day in the U.S., and most of those planes fly around with empty center fuel tanks while the main wing tanks, which always start off with fuel, are nearly depleted upon landing.

Since the first American jetliner entered into service in 1958 — some 38 years before the loss of TWA Flight 800 — airliners were flying around with empty or near-empty fuel tanks.

Just doing some simple arithmetic, hundreds of millions of flights flew around the U.S. between 1958 and 1996 and never exploded in midair because a combustible mix of fuel vapors triggered an explosion in the center fuel tank.

That's just in the U.S.; if we account for all the flying in the world during that timeframe, that would be well north of 1 billion flights in which there wasn't a single in-flight explosion.

So what actually happened on that horrific day?

Here's what we know for sure, according to documents and other reports:

TWA was one of the pre-eminent legacy airlines of its day, with a well-deserved reputation of having some of the highest quality pilots, best-trained mechanics and well-maintained aircraft.

The TWA 800 aircraft was a 747-100 model, built and delivered in 1971. At the time of the accident the aircraft was 25 years old, by no means a spring chicken but not old compared to the average fleet age of 747s used at TWA and other major airlines.

Airplanes undergo continuous inspections and maintenance as approved by government regulators, and can be kept safe and airworthy for a great many years. You might be shocked to learn the actual age of the airplane on which you're flying.

The Flight 800 aircraft had arrived at JFK a few hours earlier from Athens, Greece. The pilots reported a few minor glitches upon arrival in Athens and their subsequent return to New York, but those mechanical irregularities were all addressed.

After some routine servicing and normal repair work, the aircraft took off for Paris, France, with 230 passengers, including four pilots and 14 flight attendants. Less than 15 minutes after departure, the plane exploded just off East Moriches on Long Island.

When it happened, the plane was climbing out of about 13,700 feet — about right for its location, considering its weight and the time from takeoff. It was on a heavily traveled departure path and was trailed by airliners also headed for an Atlantic crossing.

Pilots are used to looking at other airplanes in flight. It would be hard for a pilot to misidentify something rising up from the water, climbing almost 14,000 feet into the air and striking an aircraft that was flying between 10 and 40 miles in front of them. It would be equally difficult to miss something that was just falling out of the sky, on fire, after exploding in flight for no apparent reason.

After the explosion, more than three dozen witnesses reported they'd seen contrails going up into the sky towards the plane; 18 of those people said they saw something coming up from the water, rising to meet the plane.

The FBI only summarized the interviews in its reports; the witnesses weren't permitted to see what was written or to review the reports, and the NTSB only received summary reports in which all personal information was redacted. And maybe most importantly, the witnesses — there were more than 700 of them — weren't permitted to testify.

Among those witnesses were people who attended a wedding on a beach in the Moriches, which was in progress at the time of the explosion. Some of them were recording the ceremony, their cameras trained on the wedding party with the ocean and sky in the background. Many of these people witnessed the explosion, and some said they saw something rising from the water.

During the investigation, holes were discovered in parts of the aircraft skin that penetrated from outside in — evidence that an object, most likely a missile — had struck the plane. But when investigators began photographing that evidence, according to my former colleague who was there, the FBI told them to stop.

Normally, air crash investigations in the United States are led by the National Transportation Safety Board. It is standard procedure to have investigators present who represent all of the interested parties: the NTSB and Federal Aviation Administration, the airline, the pilots union, the mechanics and the manufacturer of the airframe, engines and aircraft components.

The FBI's presence on the investigation team was unusual in any fashion, but for the agency to take the lead was unprecedented.

The salvage effort and investigation took four years, with painstaking study of every recovered piece of evidence, no matter how small.

All of the recovered pieces were reassembled back into an airplane like a giant jigsaw puzzle. After all of that, the FAA issued a recommendation that pilots turn off the center tank fuel pumps before the tank runs completely dry, to avoid a similar "malfunction."

Airlines were given years to put in a simple and inexpensive system that automatically shut down the fuel pumps when the tanks ran dry.

Yet the fuel pump itself was never implicated in the Flight 800 catastrophe.
Which leaves us with many more questions than answers.

To wit, why was the FBI, as my investigator colleague has suggested, obstructing investigators from doing their job? What did the feds find about this accident that elevated it to the level a "national security interest?"

Was it a terrorist attack — a precursor to 9/11, as has been widely suggested — or a U.S. military training exercise gone wrong?

Sadly, we might never know. But as an experienced commercial pilot, I know this much: Planes do not blow up by themselves. I firmly believe that this plane was shot down. I also believe my friend when he says the FBI imposed limits on what investigators could and couldn't analyze.

With that said: If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. Or bull.

This investigation smelled like bull all those years back, and time has done nothing to soften that stench. I don't believe the findings, and neither do hundreds of other pilots that I know.

Andrew Danziger is a 28-year airline veteran, with experience in turboprops and Boeing aircraft. He was an international 757/767 captain for the last 14 years. He has served as an airline ground school instructor and check pilot in both simulators and aircraft and was one of the pilots to fly Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign. (“Former Obama Pilot: TWA Flight 800 Was Not Blown Up By A Faulty Fuel Tank; It Was Shot Down. I’ll Always Believe That, And Here’s Why,” New York Daily News, April 15, 2015, https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york...icle-1.2186329)

My mind is closed? That's like the pot alling the kettle black. And you still have not provided the images to back up your(CTs claim) just your word.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by bknight

My mind is closed? That's like the pot calling the kettle black.

Bknight: Could I see the raw evidence please, so that I can make up my own mind what it might say?
Mike: No! You're too closed-minded!

[beachnut]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

... I think this is a good time to present an interesting, enlightening article on TWA 800 by Andrew Danziger, a former airline pilot who was one of the pilots who flew Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign:

Was TWA Flight 800 shot out of the sky?

As a former pilot, that is a question I get asked about all the time.

I'm no conspiracy theorist, but let's be clear: Yes. I say it was. And I believe the FBI covered it up.

There are many reasons to disbelieve the official explanation of what happened to TWA 800 almost 19 years ago, on July 17, 1996, off the South Shore of Long Island. There's hardly an airline pilot among the hundreds I know who buys the official explanation — that it was a fuel-tank explosion — offered by the National Transportation Safety Board some four years later.

Lots can go wrong with an airplane. Engines can fail; they can catch fire. Devices can malfunction. Pilots make errors.

But jets do not explode in midair.

If they do, it's usually because they've been shot down or bombed. There's little to suggest that there was a bomb onboard, but there is ample evidence that a missile of some sort detonated in the air very close to the plane and brought it down.

A former colleague, who will remain unnamed because he was not authorized to speak publicly about this, served as one of the lead investigators representing the interests of the TWA pilots, and I talked to him at length about the investigation after it was completed.

At least you got a UFO nut.

Please list the hundreds of pilots he claims don't believe a fuel tank exploded. BTW, fuel tank explosions have destroyed many aircraft. You don't seem to know much about flying - but you do have some hearsay from a pilot.

A UFO nut, perfect hearsay source for your continued failure to present valid evidence.

[Axxman300]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

Well, let’s be honest: We both know that you’re really not interested in the facts, that your mind is closed shut on this subject, which is why you keep making these silly comments.

No, Skippy, I'm just not interested in your line of CT BS. I'll say it again, I was a fellow conspiracy loon just like you, I have back problems from all the goal-post moving I did in my day. I played your game and I played it better than you ever will.

ARAP and all the so-called sources you quote and post links to are liars, loons, and a collection of anti-government toadies. They lack credibility for multiple reasons, chief factor being NO MISSILE STRUCK TWA-800. The idea is laughable and pathetic.

Your game doesn't work here.

Quote:

Seriously? If you had gathered up the objectivity to read the other side of the story, you would know how sophomoric this argument is. If you had done some balanced research, you would know that well over a hundred pieces of wreckage were never returned by the FBI; you would know that untold numbers of pieces of wreckage were removed from the hangar without authorization; you would know that after a number of pieces had disappeared from the hangar, FBI agents were caught, on video, removing more pieces from the hangar; you would know that a number of the pieces in the hangar were markedly altered, such as the center wing tank’s floor; among other things.

Cool story. Problem is there was enough of the fuselage to make a missile strike clear to casual viewer. And there no evidence of a missile strike.

Thanks for playing.

Quote:

Personally, I would never get on an online forum and discuss a controversial issue without at least reading a few sources from each side. But that's just me

And yet, here you are.

Quote:

I think this is a good time to present an interesting, enlightening article on TWA 800 by Andrew Danziger, a former airline pilot who was one of the pilots who flew Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign:

Imma gonna stop you right here. Just because some guy is a pilot does not automatically make him an expert in a crash he did not directly investigate. My favorite book is Ghosts of the Air by Martin Caidin, wherein he shares dozens of fantastic ghost stories and tales of time travel, and strange occurrences involving a wide range of aircraft from WWII through the mid-1990s. Caidin ia a legendary pilot who logged hours in multiple aircraft types...but it doesn't mean the stories he tells of haunted C-130s, B-29s, and time-slips true.

Just because fuel-tank explosions are rare doesn't mean they don't or can't happen.

The things that have to happen to make a missile strike true are just not realistic.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by beachnut

At least you got a UFO nut.

And a religious nut, ... and the list goes on. Mike's desperate effort to wrap these guys in the American flag and paint them as downtrodden whistleblowers is getting more desperate by the day.

"I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but here's my conspiracy theory."
"I actually like all the people and organizations I've spent page after page ignorantly trashing."

Mike's argument has devolved to, "Unless you take all these nut jobs at face value, you're obviously either biased or ignorant." It doesn't matter how many reasons we give him why they don't have any credibility.

And that's actually quite important. No matter how hard he's trying to make ARAP and Stalcup happen, none of these guys has the slightest credibility in the professional pilot industry, the aircraft and design and manufacturing industries, or the forensic engineering industries. "But, but, Tom Eagar!" No, that's not enough. We all loved Eagar, but he too was kind of a "character" for which we loved him dearly. This group and their findings have no credibility, and that's just a fact. That's why the conspiracy crowd has to pivot the argument to try to find a different reason than the painfully obvious one for why these findings languish in crackpot obscurity: "Nobody has actually given them a fair hearing," or "Everyone's biased against them and won't admit that they're actually right." In other words, the same old tired excuses.

As KDLarsen points out, the latest is, "All the same things only I'm a pilot." This is pure conspiracy rhetoric. "You have to take all these guys at face value because look at the glowing resumes and testimonials! And affidavits! what about affidavits!" Well, Grose's resume is pretty spotty. ARAP did a good job of smartwashing it, and Mike it an excellent job of swallowing it hook-line-and-sinker as they expected.

When you look with an expert's eye at what these guys actually produced, it's garbage. It's an obvious hit job made to look like opinions arrived at by other means have some sort of technical footing. It's full of omissions, cherry-picked data, dubious conclusions, completely wrong assumptions, and straw-man dismissals. Now if you didn't have any appropriate training or experience, you'd look at it and say, "Oooh, this is good stuff!" And you'd think that you could bring this to a technical table and say, "You guys have to take this seriously and you have to get down and dirty with me in all the details I think it exposes, otherwise you're 'unserious.""

Well, no. The epitome of unseriousness (if that's even a concept) is failing to understand the incredibly difficult and complex sciences that pertain to these sorts of studies and relying on obvious hacks to spoon-feed you a pseudoscientific and pseudotechnical argument that you think elevates your contribution to meaningfulness in the field.

No, I don't have to accept Vern Grose's "training and expertise" as the basis of a credible disendorsement of the NTSB findings. Grose had no relevant training or expertise. He made one valid contribution to the field of engineering management (not engineering) back in the 1960s, and spent the next 40 years in one political hustle after another, riding that one success. He's not any kind of an engineer and never was one. Mike writes off as a "lame excuse" something that shouldn't be so easily discarded. Vern tried to speak from position of expertise in a field (evolutionary biology) in which he had zero training or experience. None. Zip. Nada. Not only did he try to pass off pseudoscientific stuff that's obviously motivated by his super in-your-face religious practice, he tried to make it the law of the land. Would Vern stoop to offering a public opinion on a highly technical subject that he doesn't actually have any training or expertise in? Yes, repeatedly, without any shame whatsoever; and he even try his hardest to force you to go along with it. Vern Grose is sort of a Rudi Giuliani of engineering: he did a good thing once decades ago, but now he's the founder, president, and grand exalted CEO of Four Seasons Technical Consulting.

[catsmate]

Originally Posted by smartcooky

Well I have been on board a RNZN Frigate during a live firing exercise of its GWS20 Sea Cat surface to air missiles, and what I can tell you is that it would be impossible to NOT know it was happening.

First: Before the exercise starts, there is a briefing for all personnel involved in the exercise - not just the CIC staff and crew, but the medical staff in case there is a mishap, and the armorers, and electrical and mechanical engineering crews in case there are technical issues.

Second: As the live fire exercise is about to be started, a loud klaxon or bell warning for "General Quarters" is sounded. There is literally nowhere on the ship where you could NOT know that the ship was at General Quarters. This is followed by an announcement for all crew members that live missile firing is about to commence. Again, there is no possibility that anyone on the ship, right down to the lowest ranked Ordinary Rating, would not know that, and why, the ship is on General Quarters.

Third: There is nowhere in the superstructure or upper decks of a missile ship that you could not hear the sound of a missile being launched. It is loud and very obvious. I am told that the RIM-66 missiles under discussion are much louder than a Sea Cat at launch.

.
.

I've never witnessed Seacat but Standard is much bigger, and faster, and the launch (from VLS) was fairly spectacular

[mikegriffith1]

Originally Posted by smartcooky

Well I have been on board a RNZN Frigate during a live firing exercise of its GWS20 Sea Cat surface to air missiles, and what I can tell you is that it would be impossible to NOT know it was happening.

First: Before the exercise starts, there is a briefing for all personnel involved in the exercise - not just the CIC staff and crew, but the medical staff in case there is a mishap, and the armorers, and electrical and mechanical engineering crews in case there are technical issues.

Second: As the live fire exercise is about to be started, a loud klaxon or bell warning for "General Quarters" is sounded. There is literally nowhere on the ship where you could NOT know that the ship was at General Quarters. This is followed by an announcement for all crew members that live missile firing is about to commence. Again, there is no possibility that anyone on the ship, right down to the lowest ranked Ordinary Rating, would not know that, and why, the ship is on General Quarters.

Third: There is nowhere in the superstructure or upper decks of a missile ship that you could not hear the sound of a missile being launched. It is loud and very obvious. I am told that the RIM-66 missiles under discussion are much louder than a Sea Cat at launch.

Good grief. This would be hilarious if it weren't so pitiful. When you calm down and wipe the foam off your mouth, read my reply again and pretend you're reading for comprehension. If you do this, you should be able to easily discern that I did not even imply, much less say, that only a few sailors would know if a missile were launched from their ship. I said that only a few sailors would know if a missile fired from their ship accidentally hit an airliner. There is a huge difference between those two points.

I've been in a CIC. I have friends who are Navy surface warfare officers (SWOs). I spent much of my military career working with Navy intelligence personnel. I've worked in jobs in support of government agencies in positions that involved missile defense, weapons development, radar, satellite surveillance, etc. I've seen many missile firings, land-based and sea-based, from MANPADs to SM-2s/SM-3s/SM-6s to ESSMs to PATRIOTs to THAADs.

If you've been on a missile-capable ship during a missile exercise, you know that before a missile is fired, the weather decks are cleared, i.e., no one is topside/no one is allowed on the deck of the ship. I note this key fact because you didn't mention it.

And I say again that even the few sailors who were involved with missile operations and who were manning the CIC would not necessarily have known that their missile accidentally hit an airliner, IF that is what happened.

Their ship may not even have been the ship that tracked the target. They may have received the tracking data from a cueing ship. The cueing ship may have been many miles away and out of visual range of the target. It's not like SWOs and the few others in the CIC watch a missile shoot on a video feed. They're looking at radar screens. In the 1990s, faulty radar IDs of targets and target movements was a serious problem.

There have been many cases of surface-to-air missiles downing passenger or cargo planes, some purposely and some accidentally. There have also been a number of cases where, intentionally or unintentionally, missiles were fired at passenger/cargo planes but missed. But, there has never been a case of a Boeing 747 center wing tank exploding from an internal cause, contrary to the spurious alleged examples that some here have cited.

Google the following cases:

-- Iran Air Flight 655

-- Lionair Flight 602

-- Siberia Airlines Flight 1812

-- Malaysia Airlines Flight 17

-- Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752

-- Arkia Israel Airlines Flight 582,

The Bailey-Glasser lawsuit mentions the following additional cases:

-- In August 1996, six weeks after TWA 800 crashed, a rocket with classified Department of Defense sensors flew near and startled an American Airlines pilot near the CSEDS sister land-based site on Virginia’s eastern seaboard.

-- On November 16, 1996, almost precisely where TWA 800 went down off Long Island, a Pakistani Airlines pilot reported to Air Traffic Control that a rocket rose in front of him and continued rising above his altitude. People on shore that evening were interviewed by the FBI and confirmed that a projectile rose between airliners off Long Island at the time.

-- On March 17, 1997, an Air Force cargo pilot reported to Air Traffic Control, and later to the FBI, that he had been seconds away from taking “evasive maneuvers” to avoid being hit by a missile fired over Burlington, Vermont. After the missile arced away from his aircraft at the last minute, he flew by its exhaust plume.

The missile theory is supported by a number of cases of other large planes being shot down, or shot at, by missiles, including a number of accidental cases. The missile theory is also supported by over 100-plus eyewitness accounts. The missile theory is also supported by considerable physical evidence from the wreckage. And, the missile theory is supported by the 116 EGIS explosive-residue detections, three of which were reluctantly acknowledged by the FBI and the NTSB.

In contrast, the NTSB theory is not supported by any physical evidence, not one tiny piece, and is in fact refuted by considerable physical evidence. The NTSB theory is emphatically contradicted by the 100-plus eyewitness accounts of an object streaking upward toward TWA 800. The NTSB theory is refuted by the radar data (there was no 1,500- or 3,000-foot zoom climb). And on and on we could go.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

And on and on we could go.

Which is apparently your intent, because you just keep rehashing the same stuff you're ignorantly cribbing from unreliable sources.

[Axxman300]

Originally Posted by JayUtah

Which is apparently your intent, because you just keep rehashing the same stuff you're ignorantly cribbing from unreliable sources.

This is like an episode of Dr. Science from the old Duck's Breath Mystery Theater.

[Axxman300]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

Their ship may not even have been the ship that tracked the target. They may have received the tracking data from a cueing ship. The cueing ship may have been many miles away and out of visual range of the target. It's not like SWOs and the few others in the CIC watch a missile shoot on a video feed. They're looking at radar screens. In the 1990s, faulty radar IDs of targets and target movements was a serious problem.

Great, now we have another mystery ship nobody will ever name.

[smartcooky]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

-- Iran Air Flight 655

-- Lionair Flight 602

-- Siberia Airlines Flight 1812

-- Malaysia Airlines Flight 17

-- Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752

-- Arkia Israel Airlines Flight 582

Interesting examples.

Lets examine them shall we, keeping in mind your claim is that
1. TWA800 was shot down accidentally by a missile.
2. During a live firing exercise.
3. Those responsible for firing the missile did not know they had hit a target

Iran Air Flight 655
1. Was misidentified as an Iranian F-14, and shot down intentionally
2. During operations in a war zone
3. Those involved knew they hit their target, but didn't immediately realise it was an airliner.
This fails all three of your conditions!


Lionair Flight 602
1. Was shot down intentionally by Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
2. During operations in disputed airspace after the airline had been repeatedly warned to not fly the route they were flying.
3. Those involved knew they hit their target
This fails all three of your conditions!


Siberia Airlines Flight 1812
1. Was shot down accidentally by the Ukrainian Air Force
2. During joint exercises
3. Those involved knew they hit their target
This fails one of your three your conditions!


Malaysia Airlines Flight 17
1. Was shot down intentionally by the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian Federation using a Buk surface-to-air missile
2. During operations in a war zone
3. Those involved knew they hit their target
This fails all three of your conditions!


Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752
1. Was shot down intentionally by was shot down by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) who misidentified it as a US cruise missile.
2. During operations in a war zone
3. Those involved knew they hit their target
This fails all three of your conditions!


Arkia Israel Airlines Flight 582
1. Was not even shot down at allIt was shot at by terrorists using 9K32 Strela-2 shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missiles - they missed.
2. During terrorist operations
3. Those involved knew what they were trying to do
This fails all three of your conditions!


You're not very good at this stuff are you mikegrffith1

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by Axxman300

Great, now we have another mystery ship nobody will ever name.

You have to hand it to people who try to patch the holes in an unlikely scenario by proposing something even less likely. No, I don't mean it's less likely that multiple ships may have been involved in a live-fire exercise. More likely, actually. But the claim from the Stalcup crowd is that a number of Navy personnel have conspired, agreed, or been ordered to keep this a secret and that this plan has succeeded for nearly 30 years, through several turnovers in political oversight and operational leadership. The rule of thumb in secrecy is that the probability of a secret being revealed increases according to the square of the number of people who know it.

And we still have the straw man that the only people we have to worry about are the ones with actual operational knowledge of what target was hit. I'm still not convinced, because every ship crew I've ever been on or partied with talks to each other. And as I said before, when you get back to port and see that the news cycle is occupied for weeks with the TWA 800 incident and speculation of an errant or lucky missile, it's not hard to put two and two together and think carefully about what you might have been dragged into. The precipitating disclosure in the My Lai affair was a communication from someone who was not directly involved. The notion that airtight secrecy can have been maintained for decades among multiple ships' crews who have been ordered not to discuss something that—if true—would obviously amount to negligence or outright wrongdoing (as opposed to a legitimate, though secret, military purpose) has to weigh against the probability that the speculated scenario just didn't happen.

Originally Posted by smartcooky

Interesting examples.
[* * *]
You're not very good at this stuff are you mikegrffith1

A lot of sins are evident here. Mike's cardinal sin seems to be to trust people who, when examined, don't appear to be very trustworthy. He's taking an uncritical approach to his sources and vigorously opposing or assiduously ignoring the efforts of those who do. That's a problem.

But we have to lay a large amount of blame on the sources who are distorting the evidence. When searching for examples that allegedly fit their scenario, they cast a wide net. Then for examples that purportedly fit the conventional narrative, the net is cast much more narrowly—to the extent that the argument is an obvious straw man. This belies a motive not to investigate the accident better and come up with a more plausible explanation of what happened, but to accumulate a pseudoscientific argument that engenders unilateral doubt, and promulgates it among people not likely to verify the claims by themselves. I've given plenty of examples of how these various conspiracy theories suffer on their merits, but additionally we can question the altruism of the authors.

Another problem with Mike's approach is the ongoing loud overtone that his critics must not actually have the skills or qualifications they claim (but in most cases can demonstrate). As in many cases, he conflates rote repetition of the conspiracy theory with mastery of the sciences that pertain to it, and tries to posture that repetition as the better, more supposedly holistic approach. Real investigations have no room for such inferiority complexes.

[Axxman300]

Originally Posted by JayUtah

You have to hand it to people who try to patch the holes in an unlikely scenario by proposing something even less likely. No, I don't mean it's less likely that multiple ships may have been involved in a live-fire exercise. More likely, actually. But the claim from the Stalcup crowd is that a number of Navy personnel have conspired, agreed, or been ordered to keep this a secret and that this plan has succeeded for nearly 30 years, through several turnovers in political oversight and operational leadership. The rule of thumb in secrecy is that the probability of a secret being revealed increases according to the square of the number of people who know it.

And we still have the straw man that the only people we have to worry about are the ones with actual operational knowledge of what target was hit. I'm still not convinced, because every ship crew I've ever been on or partied with talks to each other. And as I said before, when you get back to port and see that the news cycle is occupied for weeks with the TWA 800 incident and speculation of an errant or lucky missile, it's not hard to put two and two together and think carefully about what you might have been dragged into. The precipitating disclosure in the My Lai affair was a communication from someone who was not directly involved. The notion that airtight secrecy can have been maintained for decades among multiple ships' crews who have been ordered not to discuss something that—if true—would obviously amount to negligence or outright wrongdoing (as opposed to a legitimate, though secret, military purpose) has to weigh against the probability that the speculated scenario just didn't happen.

He says he was in the Army and has worked on missile tests, but then expects us to buy into the claim that this was a test missile. The US Navy has designated missile test ranges, and they're all out in the middle of nowhere. The missile has to be shipped to a specific destination. Why would a contractor send a test device to a non-test area? As you know, things go wrong with missile tests, and you can't launch them into a crowded airspace, or near heavily populated areas. Nobody's testing missiles off Long Island. No US Navy captain is risking his career and prison over this kind of stunt.

And then there is the issue of history that is ignored: The FBI did not like Clinton. They'd been hung out to dry after Waco and other scandals, and largely blamed his administration for their troubles. The idea that they'd coverup an accidental missile launch for that White House is a bad joke. This line of TWA-800 CT falls in line with the Hillary body-count nonsense. And it would be cheaper to admit it was an accident and pay the families off than to keep it a secret. A secret involving at least a thousand sailors on the battle group, hundreds of sailors at the base who unloaded the missile from the truck or train, then loaded it onto the ship, dozens of people at the contractor who crated the missile up and loaded it onto transport, and the hundred or so people on the assembly line who built it (they'd be waiting for test results, I think), and dozens of others in the contractor-government-US Navy chain.

I do have a question. I know that American Stingers can't target US warplanes, do this also apply to civilian aircraft too? I know the Iranian 747 had its transponder turned off when we shot it down, as did that MH-60 we shot down in Northern Iraq. Does this apply to naval AA systems too?

[mikegriffith1]

Originally Posted by smartcooky

Interesting examples.

Lets examine them shall we, keeping in mind your claim is that
1. TWA800 was shot down accidentally by a missile.
2. During a live firing exercise.
3. Those responsible for firing the missile did not know they had hit a target

Iran Air Flight 655
1. Was misidentified as an Iranian F-14, and shot down intentionally
2. During operations in a war zone
3. Those involved knew they hit their target, but didn't immediately realise it was an airliner.
This fails all three of your conditions!

Lionair Flight 602
1. Was shot down intentionally by Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
2. During operations in disputed airspace after the airline had been repeatedly warned to not fly the route they were flying.
3. Those involved knew they hit their target
This fails all three of your conditions!

Siberia Airlines Flight 1812
1. Was shot down accidentally by the Ukrainian Air Force
2. During joint exercises
3. Those involved knew they hit their target
This fails one of your three your conditions!

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17
1. Was shot down intentionally by the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian Federation using a Buk surface-to-air missile
2. During operations in a war zone
3. Those involved knew they hit their target
This fails all three of your conditions!

Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752
1. Was shot down intentionally by was shot down by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) who misidentified it as a US cruise missile.
2. During operations in a war zone
3. Those involved knew they hit their target
This fails all three of your conditions!

Arkia Israel Airlines Flight 582
1. Was not even shot down at allIt was shot at by terrorists using 9K32 Strela-2 shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missiles - they missed.
2. During terrorist operations
3. Those involved knew what they were trying to do
This fails all three of your conditions!

You're not very good at this stuff are you mikegrffith1

You really need to work on your reading comprehension skills. You have once again misconstrued my statements, ignored much of what I said, and missed, or avoided, the main point.

The main point, which you studiously avoided, is that a number of large planes have been shot down by SAMs or have been shot at by SAMs. (I notice you snipped and ignored all the examples from the Bailey-Glasser lawsuit.) In contrast, there has never been a case where a Boeing 747's center wing tank exploded because of a short circuit.

Again, I do not claim that TWA 800 was shot down by errant missiles in a missile exercise. That is not my theory. I do claim that this is one of three plausible scenarios.

The two other scenarios are (1) that terrorists shot down TWA 800 with two SAMs fired from commercial boats or floating containers, and (2) that one or two Navy ships fired at a terrorist suicide plane loaded with explosives that was going to ram TWA 800 but that one of the missiles detonated near the airliner and the other caused the small plane to explode.

Until the government releases the information on the identity and locations of the Navy ships that were in the area that night, there is simply no way to determine which ships were the most likely to have fired missiles, if in fact Navy ships fired missiles that night.

Because the investigation was neither honest nor thorough, there were many leads never pursued and much evidence that was suppressed or never properly examined. We know from many witnesses that numerous pieces of wreckage never even made it to the hangar. We also know that numerous pieces were removed from the hangar without authorization. We also know that the FBI never returned the 116 pieces that tested positive for explosive residue when tested by the EGIS 3000 machines at the hangar. Former senior NTSB investigator Hank Hughes discusses other irregularities in the NTSB investigation in the affidavit he wrote for the petition for reconsideration. Here's a link to it:

https://twa800project.files.wordpres...ank-hughes.pdf

Also, I did not claim that the Navy missile officers "responsible for firing the missile did not know they had hit a target." Were you hyperventilating or something when you read my reply? How could you infer such a thing?

I said that the CIC personnel "would not necessarily have known" they had hit an airliner. The phrase "would not necessarily" allows that this might have occurred but that it would not have automatically occurred. Go ask some Navy SWOs how many times they didn't find out until later that their missile missed or that it failed to correctly identify the target, sometimes even if they thought they had scored a hit.

Sometimes CIC personnel won't know if they hit the target until the observation plane or another ship gives them a report on the results, depending on where the ship was in relation to the target.

In the account of former Navy missile NCO William Teele, a TWA 800 whistleblower, no one in the CIC realized that something had gone wrong with the missile shoot until they heard over the radio that they had hit an "airbus." Teele makes it clear that his ship was the cueing ship, i.e., that his ship tracked the target and that another ship fired at it. Here's an interview he's given:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hJZOQYof18

It's interesting that Teele indicates that the senior officers who were talking on the radio after they realized something had gone wrong didn't want to talk about it at length on that radio network and switched to a more-secure radio network.

If you know much about Navy missile operations, you will realize that Teele's account is not as clear-cut as some may initially think it is. The comments he overheard on the radio in the CIC may have been based on incomplete information or may have been deliberately misleading because the speakers knew they were not talking on a highly secure network. However, Teele's account does support the idea that Navy ships were involved in the incident.

Is Steele telling the truth? He seems credible, and he certainly exhibits a knowledge of Navy missile operations. I don't know. I just don't know. If we had the information on the Navy ships that were in the area that night, we could verify or clarify Teele's account. Absent that information, it comes down to whether or not you believe Teele.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

Again, I do not claim that TWA 800 was shot down by errant missiles in a missile exercise. That is not my theory. I do claim that this is one of three plausible scenarios.

The two other scenarios are (1) that terrorists shot down TWA 800 with two SAMs fired from commercial boats or floating containers, and (2) that one or two Navy ships fired at a terrorist suicide plane loaded with explosives that was going to ram TWA 800 but that one of the missiles detonated near the airliner and the other caused the small plane to explode.

These are vastly different scenarios. You can't say it was Col. Mustard in the Study with the Dagger or that it may have been Miss Scarlet in the Conservatory with the Lead Pipe or possibly Professor Plum in the Kitchen with the Revolver and claim that you've won the game simply because Mr. Boddy is dead in all three scenarios.

Leaving aside the inherent implausibility in much of what you propose, you simply aren't approaching this with the mindset of seriously attempting to determine a viable alternative scenario. All you're doing is grasping at anything and everything that casts doubt upon the conventional narrative. This is conspiracy rhetoric. It's armchair detective rhetoric. This, not some imaginary bias, is why these proposals aren't taken seriously in the relevant industries.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by Axxman300

I do have a question. I know that American Stingers can't target US warplanes, do this also apply to civilian aircraft too?

I'm not sure where you're getting this information. The IFF interrogator is an optional accessory to the FIM-92 launcher, but there is no launch interdiction option available. You can use the interrogator to identify NATO versus non-NATO aircraft, but nothing stops you from firing on whatever the IR/-UV seeker wants to lock onto. Yes, you can use the IFF information to determine the likelihood that you might be firing on a commercial or private flight. But the decision to fire on whatever target with the FIM-92 is always with the gunner.

I'm pretty sure the newer FIM-92 variants have other seeker options and proximity fuses (for UAVs) but the missile itself won't have onboard IFF.

Quote:

I know the Iranian 747 had its transponder turned off when we shot it down, as did that MH-60 we shot down in Northern Iraq. Does this apply to naval AA systems too?

Well, that's a big question. When you involve something like the AEGIS system, such as was deployed on USS Vincennes during the incident we've mentioned, the individual weapons are rather dumb instruments of the policies, procedures, ROE, and command decisions implemented in the CIC, informed by information presented by the integrated warfare system. The equipment absolutely gives you whatever information the radars are seeing, but nothing stops you from firing on someone squawking Mode 3 or any of the other civilian transponder modes. There's no red X that appears on the LSD, or prevents you from issuing a take order for the track.

For those of us who develop high-risk technology, both military and non-military (e.g., nuclear plant controls), the interaction between humans and machines or other humans is crucial. The decision-making processes are crucial, and the distillation of complex, contradictory, and incomplete data into something a human can quickly, accurately, and safely act upon is still pretty elusive.

The SM-2 will attack whatever it's told to attack. Once the missile leaves the rails, all the assessment and identification decisions have been made.

[Axxman300]

Thanks. No I know.

[mikegriffith1]

Originally Posted by JayUtah

You're not "discussing." You're simply regurgitating other people's opinions. [GIANT SNIP]

I will respond to this and some of your other recent replies in my next post. However, I think we first need to stop and do a reality check.

I would point out (1) that you have declined to even try to explain most of the evidence I’ve presented, and (2) that you’ve been caught making numerous invalid claims, some of which were inexcusably erroneous for a self-identified expert.

Let’s start by considering some the evidence that you have declined to even try to explain.

-- When I discussed the conclusions of the chief medical pathologist in the NTSB investigation and of the medical examiner in charge of all victim autopsies in the investigation, you summarily dismissed their observations as “Gish gallop” without saying a single word about the points they made.

-- When I detailed the damning results of the WCAS lab testing of the reddish-orange residue on one of the two Sanders pieces of seat foam from TWA 800, you dismissed this as "Gish gallop" and made no attempt to explain the results. As a reminder, the results showed that the residue contained high concentrations of elements used in explosives and that the residue's elements were very different from those of 3M glue.

-- You have made no effort to explain the 116 EGIS explosive-residue detections. You have, perhaps wisely, declined to defend the FBI and the NTSB’s preposterous assertion that all but three of those detections were false positives.

-- You have made no effort to explain the three explosive-residue detections that the FBI and the NTSB were willing to acknowledge as valid. I should add, however, that I have noticed that, unlike several others here, you have not repeated the myth that bomb-sniffing training was done on the TWA 800 plane in St. Louis five weeks before the crash.

-- When I noted that we now know from FOIA-released documents that CIA personnel admitted in internal e-mails that they knew the radar data did not support the 3,000-foot zoom climb, you snipped this from your quoted reply and said nothing about it.

-- You have made no effort to explain the fact that over 100 eyewitnesses reported seeing an object streak upward from ground/sea level and head toward TWA 800 before it exploded. I should note, however, that you have not joined others in repeating the myth that the plane climbed. The zoom climb was the only explanation that the NTSB offered for the 100-plus accounts of the streaking object.

I might add that, yes, we do know who many of these witnesses were/are because many of their FBI 302 forms contain information about their occupation, etc., and because researchers have interviewed dozens of them.

-- When I cited and quoted a sizable segment of the TWA 800 Project's reply to the NTSB's response to the petition for reconsideration, you did not address a single point made in the quoted segment or in the rest of the reply. You speculated, with no supporting evidence, that the radar portion of the reply was "all Stalcup," as if this somehow proved it was wrong, and then you summarily dismissed the reply as "conspiracy nonsense." You have yet to make a single substantive comment about the points made in the TWA 800 Project's reply.

-- When I documented the bogus nature of the list of fuel-tank explosions reprinted in the NTSB report, you just waved this all aside with another "Gish gallop" dismissal and said nothing about any of the points I made.

Now let’s look at some of your errors. Every single time you have been caught making an invalid claim, you have either ignored your error or refused to admit it.

-- After I asked you if you had read the ARAP report, and after you said you had, I purposely let you repeatedly make the erroneous claim that ARAP/Donaldson posited MANPAD missiles, specifically Stinger missiles. After letting you repeat this claim several times, I documented that the ARAP report expressly rejects the idea that MANPAD missiles were involved.

You not only refused to admit your error, but you sought to deflect attention from your blunder by erroneously accusing Commander Donaldson of “flip-flopping” on the type of missile. That’s not a “flip-flop.” That’s not what that term means. Donaldson, being objective and open minded, changed his mind after he researched the issue further. That’s not a “flip flop.” That’s showing a willingness to change your mind when you encounter additional information. You might try it sometime.

-- You said the "mainstream narrative" does not claim that the structural damage done to the nose landing gear was caused merely by impact on ocean water. I then quoted an NTSB group report that expressly makes that claim.

-- You said the "mainstream narrative does not conclude" that a low-order explosion "was the proximal cause of the damage" done to the nose landing gear, ignoring the fact that I made no such claim. After noting that this damage could not have been done by water impact, I merely asked how the low-order explosion posited by the NTSB could have caused it.

Of course the NTSB did not claim that the alleged low-order explosion caused the damage, because the NTSB claimed that water impact caused it.

-- You made the truly idiotic claim that I was arguing that "a warship could just fire a missile and no one but a few people would know." I don't normally use the term "idiotic," but that's about the nicest way to describe your ridiculous claim. However, to be fair and honest, I will note that, without admitting your previous error, you did say in a later reply that I was not saying that only a few sailors would know if a missile were fired but that only a few would know if the missile accidentally shot down an airliner.

-- You said that Admiral Moorer was not an "active, participating" member of ARAP because he was unable to "pull strings to get the necessary work done." ("If ARAP included a former JSC chairman as an active, participating member, why wasn't he able to pull strings to get the necessary work done?") In point of fact, he was quite active. He and Commander Donaldson spent many hours talking about TWA 800, and Admiral Moorer participated in the two-hour ARAP-FIRO press conference.

-- You insisted that Donaldson was the sole author of the ARAP report, as if somehow this would discredit it. No one would who had actually read the ARAP report would have made such an erroneous statement. Donaldson was the principal author, but several other authors, including a former pilot and an experienced research scientist, authored a significant portion of the report (27 of its 127 pages, or 21%).

-- Some of your arguments have been downright silly and juvenile. When I called you out on your bogus claim that Commander Donaldson did not conduct an investigation, you doubled-down on the absurdity by making the comical argument that since Donaldson was skeptical of the NTSB theory when he began his multi-year investigation, his investigation was not really an investigation, as if he was incapable of changing his mind after he began his research.

-- You keep making the false and inane claim that I am merely repeating what I have found in sources that reject the NTSB theory. One, that is not true, and you know it, but you keep saying it anyway. My critique of the EMRTC test is my own original research, as is my critique of the list of fuel-tank explosions in the NTSB report that were ostensibly similar to the center-wing-tank explosion theorized by the NTSB. Two, even if I were merely repeating what I've found in skeptical sources, that would prove nothing about the accuracy of my statements.

-- You also keep making the false claim that all skeptics are Clinton-hating conservatives and that they reject the NTSB theory for purely political reasons. One, such a claim says volumes about your own extreme political bias. Two, the claim is ridiculous. Many of the people who have publicly voiced their rejection of the NTSB theory are liberals or moderates.

-- [i]After[i/] I named a Navy whistleblower, William Teele, and even provided a video of Teele giving his account, you said, "The notion that a Navy ship fired an SM-2 and accidentally hit a civilian airliner, and that not one single sailor on that vessel has spoken up about it boggles the imagination." Moreover, Teele is not the only former sailor to come forward to researchers on this issue.

I suspect your real position is this: "If an accidental shootdown occurred, surely at least one sailor would have spoken up about it by now; however, any sailor who has spoken up about it must be lying!"

-- You also keep misusing the term "straw man." You don't seem to know what it means. I've only seen you use it correctly twice out of the some-two dozen times you've used it, and I think you only did so accidentally.

-- You did catch me in one error: I initially misspelled Dr. Grose's name as "Gross." Yes, you got me there. However, in my defense, I would note that several reputable news outlets and educational institutions have misspelled his name as "Gross" on their websites, including CBS News, Time Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, George Mason University, Canadian Television News, and CNN.

-- When I faulted you for being unwilling to admit that it was significant that the NTSB flight test was done when the weather was 13-17 degrees warmer than it was when TWA 800 took off, you denied you had done this. However, when I first pointed out the temperature difference and said this was significant, you replied, “I don’t agree with your analysis.” If you want to refresh your memory, here is a link to your reply: http://www.internationalskeptics.com...postcount=2394.

-- When I discussed the terminal velocity of objects falling from 14,000 feet in relation to the damage done to the nose landing gear, you made the astonishing claim that “Terminal velocity is irrelevant.” This jaw-dropping claim leads me to question your credentials and competence.

-- Right after you claimed that terminal velocity is irrelevant, you referred to your comical theory that the nose landing gear was damaged while it descended in the air because it traveled at irregular angles while it fell. That is one of the silliest ideas I have ever heard. No genuine or honest engineer would float such a laughable theory. The NTSB theory that the nose landing gear was damaged by impact on water is pitiful, but your theory is even worse.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by Axxman300

Thanks. No I know.

Modern versions of the SM-3, however, can self-destruct if the Aegis datalink operator says so. That could happen if post-launch data indicated a friendly. Still a human decision, though. The missile itself has no, "Hey, wait a minute..." function.

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

I will respond to this and some of your other recent replies in my next post. However, I think we first need to stop and do a reality check.

No, this is yet another Gish gallop riddled with errors and misrepresentations.

Quote:

This jaw-dropping claim leads me to question your credentials and competence.

Isn't that really all you're here to do? Everyone except you seems to be ignorant or incompetent or biased. You're obsessed with the belief that you're the smartest one in the room.

[dudalb]

I wonder how long until the conspiracy mongers for flight 900 begin to scream about the US drone being shot down by the Russians....

[The Common Potato]

FWIW, the Aircrash Investigation / Mayday episode Explosive Proof is available for download on the Sky platform (National Geographic).

[sts60]

Obviously I am a latecomer to this thread, but this Stalcup gentleman is claiming that the Navy was conducting a shoot exercise with a Standard missile… 20 or so miles off Long Island?

I mean, did he really claim that?

[KDLarsen]

Originally Posted by Axxman300

I do have a question. I know that American Stingers can't target US warplanes, do this also apply to civilian aircraft too? I know the Iranian 747 had its transponder turned off when we shot it down, as did that MH-60 we shot down in Northern Iraq. Does this apply to naval AA systems too?

If you're referring to Iran Air 655, it most certainly did not have its transponder turned off. As recorded by the USS Vincennes' Aegis system, it was transmitting a transponder signal on the mode III civilian frequency.

There was some confusion owing a mode II signal being recieved at the same time, but IIRC Bandar Abbas airport was a joint civilian/military airport also used by the IRIAF, which could have caused a mode II signal to appear.

And here's the rub, as far as the subject at hand is concerned, all of this was eventually found out. Even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, eventually had to admit on Nightline that not only was flight 655 climbing, and not in an 'attack profile' as had originally been claimed, it was still inside Iranian territorial waters at the time.

[smartcooky]

Originally Posted by KDLarsen

If you're referring to Iran Air 655, it most certainly did not have its transponder turned off. As recorded by the USS Vincennes' Aegis system, it was transmitting a transponder signal on the mode III civilian frequency.

There was some confusion owing a mode II signal being recieved at the same time, but IIRC Bandar Abbas airport was a joint civilian/military airport also used by the IRIAF, which could have caused a mode II signal to appear.

And here's the rub, as far as the subject at hand is concerned, all of this was eventually found out. Even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, eventually had to admit on Nightline that not only was flight 655 climbing, and not in an 'attack profile' as had originally been claimed, it was still inside Iranian territorial waters at the time.

Yup, and it is why this nutbar conspiracy theory that mikegriffith1 adheres to is simply not possible. There is no way this could be kept quiet. There would have to be thousands of people from several different agencies and organizations all involved in a coordinated cover up - the US Navy, the Pentagon, the FBI, and the NTSB.... and there is not a single whistleblower in 30 years.

FFS, only two people knew that Bill Clinton was banging a White House intern (Clinton and the Intern), yet somehow, it got out!

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by KDLarsen

If you're referring to Iran Air 655, it most certainly did not have its transponder turned off. As recorded by the USS Vincennes' Aegis system, it was transmitting a transponder signal on the mode III civilian frequency.

Agreed. I too was confused by what was mentioned as an "Iranian 747." The airplane shot down by USS Vincennes was an Airbus A300. The Aegis tapes confirmed it had been properly squawking ("III-6760") the whole time, while on a completely nominal climb-out.

Quote:

There was some confusion owing a mode II signal being recieved at the same time, but IIRC Bandar Abbas airport was a joint civilian/military airport also used by the IRIAF, which could have caused a mode II signal to appear.

The airport was indeed dual military and civilian, and an Iranian cargo plane had just taken off from it, squawking II-1100. This is likely the cause of the initial Mode 2 signal. There was a sort of bug in the Aegis system where hooking a track does not change the range gate on the radar. It's possible for stale transponder data to be momentarily associated with the new target, if the targets are close together.

Much has been written about what happened next.

Quote:

And here's the rub, as far as the subject at hand is concerned, all of this was eventually found out.

The claim being made here is that but for Iranian civilian reports that an airliner had been shot down, the U.S. would have covered up the incident completely and successfully avoided any disclosure. Therefore a similar scenario must be playing out in the TWA 800 case. This argument obviously begs a question or two.

[catsmate]

Originally Posted by mikegriffith1

You really need to work on your reading comprehension skills. You have once again misconstrued my statements, ignored much of what I said, and missed, or avoided, the main point.

More pathetic back-peddling and obfuscation......

[JayUtah]

Originally Posted by sts60

Obviously I am a latecomer to this thread, but this Stalcup gentleman is claiming that the Navy was conducting a shoot exercise with a Standard missile… 20 or so miles off Long Island?

I mean, did he really claim that?

This thread had been fallow for many years before it got bumped to the top. A moderator appropriately transferred relevant discussions here from a thread in which they were off-topic.

There are three incompatible conspiracy theories being peddled by our most recent conspiracy-theory advocate. He can't decide which one to stick with and argue according to the actual evidence, so he's rapidly switching among them as necessary to address the challenges as they arise.

Retired U.S Navy commander William Donaldson, a long-deceased primary at the conspiracy club that went by ARAP, and their patron Reed Irvine (yes, that Reed Irvine) argue that probably-Iranian terrorists fired a U.S.-supplied weapon from a small boat in or near U.S. territorial waters at TWA 800. Some variant of FIM-92 has been suggested, and is prominently featured at ARAP's long-fallow web site. But the report Donaldson wrote and sent unsolicited to Congress suggests a ground-launched AIM-52A. This theory does not materially implicate the U.S. Navy.

A student Thomas Stalcup, while completing his PhD in physics (electromagnetic properties of crystalline structures) in Florida, formed the idea that ATC radar data should be interpreted to indicate high-velocity ejecta from the breakup site and therefore forms secondary evidence of a bomb or missile warhead detonation. Pursuing this theory via social media, a documentary film (the subject of this thread), and various forms of legal action seems to have been his primary activity for the past decade or so. Based on recent disclosures of Navy activity in the area in May 1996—two months prior to the downing of TWA 800—pursuant to a FOIA request he submitted, he has now filed suit against the Navy and its contractors alleging clandestine operations involving ship-fired SM-2 Standard missiles in the JFK departure airspace, one of which "negligently" tracked on TWA 800 and destroyed it. He doesn't name the ship or provide much detail in his speculation.

Then author Jack Cashill, also discussed much earlier in this thread, argues that a U.S. Navy ship (unnamed here too) tried to shoot down an alleged terrorist light aircraft stuffed with explosives that he claims was trying to ram TWA 800 in a suicide attack. The missile missed the terrorist airplane and hit the airliner instead. Cashill has written at least two books that offer TWA 800 conspiracy theories.

[Axxman300]

Originally Posted by JayUtah

Agreed. I too was confused by what was mentioned as an "Iranian 747." The airplane shot down by USS Vincennes was an Airbus A300. The Aegis tapes confirmed it had been properly squawking ("III-6760") the whole time, while on a completely nominal climb-out.

Sorry about the confusion. We're having major storms here and it's slowing down the internet. And I don't feel like I have I have the time to look everything up, especially on a point which was already discussed a few times earlier in this thread. I get the Iranian jet confused with Pan Am 103.

Anyway, I recall that the some of the crew was interviewed here and there after they returned to San Diego, and books have been written about that event. The idea the Navy could keep this kind of thing secret is a bad joke.