Posted on 11/06/2007 9:21:21 AM PST by neverdem
More than six years after retired United Airline captain Ray Lahr launched his Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) petition into the fate of TWA Flight 800, the FBI has shown him—likely by accident—one seriously smoking gun.
The Boeing 747 blew up off the coast of Long Island on July 17, 1996. One of the FBI documents received recently by Lahr and his attorney, John Clarke of Washington DC, details a communication that took place six days after the crash:
"On Tuesday, July 23, 1996, a representative from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) advised [the FBI] that after a visual analysis of both the videotape as well as a number of still photographs taken from various portions of the tape, the phenomenon captured by [name redacted] appeared to be consistent with the exhaust plume from a MANPAD [Man-portable air-defense] missile."
“The FBI guy who looked at this must not have read it, or not have realized what it would reveal,” says Lahr. “Otherwise he would have redacted most of it as before.”
Adding a new level of intrigue to the investigation is the fact that the video in question appears to have been shot on July 12, 1996, five days before the crash.
The earlier, unedited FBI document reports that a fellow and his friend on Long Island were attempting to videotape the sunrise when they saw and recorded “a grey trail of smoke ascending from the horizon at an angle of approximately 75 [degrees].”
So compelling was the visual that the fellow made a comment to his friend, heard on the tape, “They must be testing a rocket.” The fellow calculated that object was heading towards the Atlantic Ocean.
On the document Lahr first received, the story of the video ends right there. The next two paragraphs had...
(Excerpt) Read more at cashill.com ...
There made a lot of those planes. If there was indeed a defect then it's not beyond reason that there would have been more than one plane that had the same problem.
They made a lot of 767s, too, but to my knowledge only one has been torn apart in mid-air when its thrust reversers deployed. They made a lot of DC-10s, but only one that I'm aware of had a its cargo hatch fail catastrophically or have an engine tear off. They made a lot of MD-11s but so far as I know only one was brought down by an electrical fire.
Civil aircraft are well designed, well tested, and generally carefully manufactured and maintained. When system failures occur, as the will with any manufactured product, they are rare and usually don't occur again because a solution is identified and a corrective action put in place. The fact that a one time failure could cause a fuel tank to explode under the right conditions doesn't surprise me much, and the fact that it hasn't happened again doesn't surprise me at all. It just means that recommended corrective action has been taken.
MythBusters couldn’t reproduce the explosion for gasoline fuel tanks. The link that I gave you was for MythBusters shooting multiple bullets into filled and “empty” gas tanks.
They didn’t explode.
Moreover, kerosene fuel tanks are even less combustible. Orders of magnitude safer. Less volatile.
Civilian airliners burn kerosene. TWA 800 burned kerosene.
TWA 800 didn’t just self-detonate. Witnesses on the ground and at least one pilot in the air reported seeing a missile launched from the surface rise to impact TWA 800.
Now *that* impact could have exploded the center fuel tank.
It seems that some would dispute any assertion that it is a fact that it was a one time failure associated to a defect that caused the fuel tank to explode.
I guess the dog will continue to chase it's tail on this issue.
Yep. It was memorable to me. At the time, I lived right across the highway from LAX and remember seeing a whole slew of DC-10s lined up, just parked week after week. Quite a sight, really.
I understand that. There are many who believe it was a missile of some type, though that flies in the face of a considerable amount of evidence. And of course there are always those who jump at the chance to blame anything on Clinton.
The gas tank theory was incredible from the get go. I thought the evidence of a surface to air missile was obvious. The question is who did it. Why would the U.S. do a training exercise in that airspace? The whole story made no sense.
Actually, an issue with the plane is the most plausible. If you’ll really do some research, you’ll see that the gas tank isn’t as incredible as you may believe. Warning, you can’t be lazy and just shoot from the hip if you want to learn it.
Apparently not, I got flamed for mentioning it!
Ping to #80
My memory of it(I was on duty TWA at the time) was that 800 was delayed because of equipment issues and when it finally left the gate, the procedure for a late departing flight is that it jumps to the head of the line. The scheduled departure was, in fact, an El-Al flight but 800 bumped the line and got clearence for that departure slot. If an attacker was selecting a target based on scheduled departure times, TWA 800 would have, to their knowledge, been the El-Al aircraft. I heard that here in STL within a day of the incident in a briefing.
Thanks, always interesting reading.
It was well known within the airline industry that El-Al had that slot.
And I’ll repeat, show me a terrorist who bases his plans on a airplane leaving on time from JFK and I’ll show you a terrortist who has either never flown into or out of New York or who is a complete idiot.
I would guess that information pertaining to TWA 800 was included in the documents stolen by Berger.
John
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