TWA 800: How the CIA Hijacked the FBI Investigation

American Thinker ^ | June 14, 2016 | Jack Cashill

[luvie]

Do we know the source of the missile?

[Ronin]

Gosh!!!! ONE 737 suffered a fuel tank explosion in 1990 (of the more than 9,000 such aircraft constructed since 1968), and the TWA investigations have made them “safer”.

Oh, I’ll grant you that anything that is designed by man can be improved somehow, but I still think that anyone who believes TWA 800 exploded due to a center fuel tank explosion should keep checking under his pillow for gifts from the tooth fairy.

[ntnychik]

Kallstrom may well have been a standup guy until the day Dep. Atty. Gen. Jamie Gorelick told him to stand down.

[cherry]

Do I recall correctly that Rush had Kallstrom on his radio talk show many years ago?...maybe it was Hannity....

anyway, whoever had him on his show was buying his bullshit from the get go....

folks, if you think you're paranoid about things, think again....when it comes to our oligharchy the past 2-3 decades, ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE and probable.

[cherry]

I could buy a navy mishap....an old poster always pointed out that the "dogs didn't bark"...iows, there were no closures of airports or travel interruptions IIRC...

the crooked govt would have interest in having we mere sheeple believe that the TWA blowup was not the govt's fault nor was it terrorist...

gee....we might get uppity if we knew the truth...

[cherry]

which is why I believe military and other govt entities should offer NO defined pensions at all....it makes sheep of supposedly proud military men and those men will do anything, and everything, to keep their pension....

[cherry]

who says they cared what airplane they shot down????/.....they wanted to shoot down ANY airplane...

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

It was not the U.S. Navy. Stupid theory. Too many people would know, and the truth would leak out.

Given this was the Clinton administration, it must have been an internet video that insulted Islam. My first thought at the time was that it was Iranian revenge for the Vincennces incident. I found the internet video center fuel tank explanation lacking in credibility at the time, but I am not given to conspiracy theories. But it was the Clinton administration, in a time and place where truth was a stranger.

And what documents did Sandy Burger steal from the National Archives, and what truth was he so desperate to extinguish?

[rsobin]

Either way the navy had to be part of the misdirection.

[Lower Deck]

It was likely a navy mishap.

You don't accidentally target and shoot a Navy missile. Too many people and two many steps involved.

[Lower Deck]

Whatever the hell they were doing with live fire in civilian airspace is beyond nuts.

Exactly. To believe that the Navy conducted a live fire exercise into one of the busiest air corridors in the world is beyond nuts. It means that the Navy brass is stupid beyond belief. Is that was you are suggesting?

One Freeper suggested it was a civilian contractor firing an antiaircraft missile from a sub, which is plausible.

What possible reason would there be for such a weapon? How would the submarine target it? How would it know when it needed to fire it?

[Pelham]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3437887/posts?page=100#100

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3437887/posts?page=153#153

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Either way the navy had to be part of the misdirection.

No. NO. If you mean that the Navy denying responsibility is evidence of their involvement than you have an unfalsifiable hypothesis. A tautology.

[rsobin]

“You don’t accidentally target and shoot a Navy missile”
Like the Iranian airliner?

[rsobin]

To all.
Please see the documentary. There are dozens of very credible people who saw contrails moving up to the jet. There were very underhanded procedures followed during the investigation. There is very credible professional testimony at odds with the official explanations. Look at the film of the center fuel tank. There is inward shrapnel damage.
Again watch the film.

[Lower Deck]

Like the Iranian airliner?

Nothing accidental in that. The tracking and the firing were deliberate. They misidentified the target.

[Pelham]

One freeper who seems to have knowledge of such things suspects that was an early live fire test of a missile that he knew was under development at the time. He said the missile builder he has in mind had their own sub and the crew would have been just the few technicians involved in a black program. People used to keeping information tight. The program manager blundered by running his test too close to airline traffic and the missile locked on to TWA instead of the target drone.

[Swordmaker]

One benefit of the TWA 800 investigation is that center fuel tanks have been made safer due to Airworthiness Directives.

The NTSB was SO concerned about this that they waited until 2008, twelve years after the TWA-800 disaster, eight years after they made their conclusion of its cause, to release their final directive on fuel tank inerting. . . and then only required retro-fitting the existing fleet by 2018! In addition, they only identified 60 out of over 1500 or so 747s among the aircraft to even be retrofitted! What's wrong with this picture, if it was such a dangerous condition and design as they claimed?

"The final rule does not direct the adoption of specific inerting technology either by manufacturers or operators, but establishes a performance-based set of requirements that set acceptable flammability exposure values in tanks most prone to explosion or require the installation of an ignition mitigation means in an affected fuel tank. Technology now provides a variety of commercially feasible methods to accomplish these vital safety objectives," according to the FAA.

It said technology now exists that can prevent ignition of flammable fuel vapors by reducing their oxygen concentration below the level that will support combustion. The likelihood of an explosion when a fire source is introduced to the fuel tank is reduced by making the vapors 'inert'.

FAA-developed prototype onboard fuel tank inerting systems have been successfully flight tested on Airbus A320 and Boeing 747 and 737 airplanes. The FAA has approved inerting systems for the Boeing 747 and 737, with two aircraft of each model type performing as expected during airline in-service evaluations. Boeing plans to install these systems on all new production airplanes.

Within two years, all new aircraft must include the technology designed to significantly reduce the risk of center fuel tank fires as part of the final rule. In addition, within ten years, large passenger transports built after 1992 must be retrofitted with technology designed to keep center fuel tanks from catching fire.

The cost of installing the new technology is estimated to range from $92,000 to $311,000 per aircraft, depending on its size, a far cry from the estimated $20 billion that an industry group had previously estimated for the overall cost.

The 2,730 U.S. aircraft that must be retrofitted include: 900 A-320s, 50 A-330s, 965 Boeing 737s, 60 Boeing 747s, 475 Boeing 757s, 150 Boeing 767s and 130 Boeing 777s.

Industry officials believe the safety modifications will cost an estimated $1 billion just for US-registered jetliners. Many foreign air carriers voluntarily adhere to U.S. air safety directives and further nitrogen generation system sales outside the United States can be expected.

There are at least two companies claiming to have developed nitrogen generation systems that comply with the new federal safety directive. Honeywell says it has now delivered Nitrogen Generation Systems (NGS) for the Boeing Next-Generation 737 aircraft, which delivers nitrogen-enriched air to the aircraft center fuel tank, significantly reducing flammability and increasing commercial aircraft safety."— "Industry Steps Forward On Fuel Tank Inerting", Aviation Today, August 4, 2008

It seems the NTSB was not in too much of a hurry to do anything. They did not take their TWA-800 conclusions seriously enough to release the final directive in any kind of timely fashion.

When we look at the tests they ran to justify their findings, to get the Center Wing Tank to explode at all, they had to fill it with propane. Jet A Fuel (kerosene) is hard to even light on fire, much less to get to explode. They could NOT get a Center Wing Tank to explode even with their theoretical optimal fuel/air mix which would make the ideal flash over if there were a ignition source. They finally got some results when they mixed the Jet A Fuel with pure oxygen. However, they could not, ever, demonstrate that the Jet A Fuel would mix spontaneously in the 747 Center Wing Tank from the ullage amount left in an empty tank to create anything close to the ideal fuel/air mix necessary for detonation at anything close to the temperatures they theorized existed on that July day in 1996.

Their other problem was there simply was no ignition source inside the CWT. Boeing had designed it not to have any such ignition source. . . Or any electrical at all.

When the Center Wing Tank was recovered from the ocean, it showed no sign of outwardly bowed distortions in its structure which would have to have been there had it exploded. Instead, it showed INWARDLY bowed distortions as though the pressures that damaged it came from the outside of the tank which were totally inconsistent with it exploding.

The Center Wing Tank is not just a fuel tank, it is made up of load bearing structural members, It is, in fact, constructed like a box girder and is the part of the plane to which the wings are attached to the fuselage. Had the Center Wing Tank exploded as the initiating event, the wings would not have supported the plane for any kind of zoom climb at all as the NTSB and CIA showed in the cartoons. The wings could not have handled the stress at all. Instead, the left wing detached late in the event instead of early, far after the "Zoom climbs" of either the CIA or NTSB theories of the event.

[Swordmaker]

The transponder was pinging from the aircraft. I don't think tracking it was that difficult of a problem.

The transponder only pings when it is queried by a proper signal from the active radar on the proper signal. That signal swept the plane about every 4.64 seconds. The missile, if there was one, was traveling at Mach 2 or greater. At that speed, the missile would travel almost a mile in the 4.64 seconds and there would only be time for any such missile to get just two transponder returns during the flight, not enough to use for any lock on the plane for guidance. Most of these MANPAD missiles are heat seekers and would then average the center of the heat sources when they get close enough.

Flight TWA-800 at 13,800 feet was visible by the naked eye at 8:31 PM on that July evening from the range this theoretical missile could be fired. It was at the extreme altitude range that could be reached by some tripod launched missiles, but not by any shoulder launched missiles.

TWA-800 was also being tracked by two passive radar stations, but the records of those radar stations were taken to the White House the next day and have never been seen since. One of them was a much more rapid sweep. Those records could have told us a lot of the missing distance data and possibly some altitude data and certainly would have shown data on any bogeys that might have been in the area. The Active Radar return pings do not record any data not related to transponders, unfortunately. The air traffic controllers do not need to have their screens cluttered up with data they are not concerned about so their systems are designed to exclude everything except air traffic data.

[DiogenesLamp]

The transponder only pings when it is queried by a proper signal from the active radar on the proper signal.

Which was happening from that radar station in Pennsylvania as was indicated in the link I previously submitted.

Beyond that, I do not think it is too technically difficult for anyone to ping it if they want to. It's made to automatically respond to the correct sort of query on the correct frequency of microwave radiation. You could design a missile so that the missile will continuously ping it.

It would be effectively guiding the missile to itself. That would actually be a pretty easy guidance system to build.

Flight TWA-800 at 13,800 feet was visible by the naked eye at 8:31 PM on that July evening from the range this theoretical missile could be fired. It was at the extreme altitude range that could be reached by some tripod launched missiles, but not by any shoulder launched missiles.

If I remember correctly, Jack Cashill said it was bigger than a shoulder fired missile. If you have it mounted on a large boat, it likely can have a pretty good reach.