[U S Army EOD]

So you are saying that the missle homed in on the aircrafts ID transponder? The explosion was internal. An airburst outside the aircraft would have not taken the nose off like it did. It would have had been as big as a Hawk or SA6 to get the plane. It had all the tell tale of a bomb going off. The streak is hard to explain though.

If it was a missle and did home in on the transponder, the missle made contact. I wonder how close the transmitting antenna would have been to the so called fuel tank or the nose of the aircraft. I think it broke into just forward of the wing.

[Alberta's Child]

The streak is hard to explain though.

It's not just the streak, though. And this is what makes the accidental shoot-down very plausible.

Many eyewitness accounts of the "streak" were dismissed out of hand because they were not consistent in their description of what they saw -- particularly in terms of the trajectory. But it's not as if these people were describing any number of different flight paths . . . All of them basically came down to two different groups: some of them saw a streak go from Point 1 and travel in Direction A, while others saw a streak go from Point 2 and travel in Direction B.

What they saw was two different "streaks" -- an unmanned drone that is used by the Navy as a target in its weapons tests, and the missile itself that was fired at the drone from a different ship.

[Bryan24]

For what its worth, I believe that TWA800 was shot down with a modified Stinger or SA-7.

I believe the terrorists figured out a way to home in on the transponder of an airliner and modified the seeker head to track on that signal. The transmitter antenna for the transponder sits very close to the center fuel tank on the bottom of the plane.