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Most believe that TWA 800 exploded in a huge fireball at 13,800 feet. However, that huge fireball explosion took place below 7,500 feet - perhaps as low as 5,000 feet. One of FreeRepublic's most ardent missile shootdown conspiracy theorists, Swordmaker, puts that huge fireball explosion at about 7,000 feet

The key witnesses are Sven Faret & Ken Wendell who prepared their own detailed report. They were flying at about 8,500 feet and saw the huge fireball explode below that altitude, flew over to the smoke cloud it left and determined that the top of it was at 7,500 feet

The brief fiery streak, seized upon by the conspiracy theorists as a missile, appears to have been the ignition source of the huge fireball explosion as evidenced ty the fact that by then all of the wreckage had been falling for quite some time.

Additionally, ten expert metallurgists (four from NTSB, three from Boeing, two from FBI Laboratory, and one scientist consultant) determined from their own extensive examinations of the wreckage that there was no evidence that TWA 800 was the victim of a missile(s) shootdown.

The New York Post, in its story of September 22, 1996, reported, Law-enforcement sources said the hardest evidence gathered so far overwhelmingly suggests a surface-to-air missile...

The FBI interviewed 154 "credible" witnesses -- including scientists, schoolteachers, Army personnel and business executives -- who described seeing a missile heading through the sky just before TWA 800 exploded.

"Some of these people are extremely, extremely credible," a top federal official said.

FBI technicians mapped the various paths -- points in the sky where the witnesses said they saw the rising "flare-like" object -- and determined that the "triangulated" convergence point was virtually where the jumbo jet initially exploded.

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/9/4/124854.shtml
The evidence is very clear that the fuel tank did not explode when the plane was above 13,000 feet and lost its nose. A pilot who observed the accident from an altitude of 8,500 feet says that TWA 800 was a thousand feet below him when the fuel tank burst into flames, creating a trail of black smoke.

Who was the author of that NewsMax article? Reed Irvine of Accuracy In Media - another ardent supporter of the missile shootdown notion.

In addition, we now have evidence from Iraq of what happens to a commercial airline hit with a MANPAD. The result is wing damage near an engine. It's a critical hit, especially during landing, but all were able to land safely with skilled pilots at the controls.

None of these missiles, with their five-pound fragmentation warheads, hit a center tank at the wing root causing instantaneous catastrophic damage. TWA 800 was at 13,800 feet, at a non-critical point in its flight plan, doing an uneventful climb to its final assigned altitude.