Posted on 03/29/2007 11:25:45 AM PDT by Hal1950
What prompts this column is an e-mail I received last week from a retired USNR commander and former TWA pilot, with whom I had had no prior contact.
He recounted a conversation that he had shortly after the mid-air destruction of TWA Flight 800 on July 17, 1996, off the coast of Long Island. He had a particular interest in the plane's demise for two reasons. One is that he was a qualified accident investigator. The second is that he had flown that very same flight a week earlier.
"It had to be a bloody missile, probably an un-armed Tomahawk, going for center-of-mass," he said to a senior flight manager of his acquaintance. "They were most likely going for a target drone and testing their capability to go-through normal aircraft traffic to get at the target."
The flight manager agreed and recounted what he had been told by a maintenance foreman at the investigation hangar on Long Island.
"They had this curtained area over in the corner with Marine armed guards in front," the foreman had told him. "But, I did see one of the right mainmounts that had a crease out of it, as if something round had passed through it. And, to me, it sure looked like an 'entry' and 'exit' hole in the fuselage."
I cite this e-mail for two reasons. One is that the accepted wisdom among many TWA pilots immediately after the crash matches closely the detailed account of what transpired, at least as reported in an extraordinarily comprehensive anonymous review that I and investigator Ray Lahr received a few months ago.
The second reason is that all of the best eyewitness accounts that I have received that might verify this scenario are second-hand. In fact, no one that I know has talked to anyone who witnessed the firing of the fatal missiles.
My partner in this investigation, James Sanders, had developed any number of discreet first-hand sources in 1996-1997, but all of these sources "went away after we were indicted." The "we" refers to James and his wife, Elizabeth, at the time a TWA trainer, both of whom eventually were convicted of the bogus charge of conspiracy to steal airplane parts.
If an eyewitness were to come forward, now would be a good time, a safer time as well. The true story might derail the ambitions of a candidate or two – Al Gore for sure, Hillary probably – but the major media would be more willing to listen before either became the party's nominee. If either is elected president, the story dies.
I can be contacted through my website, cashill.com, and Ray Lahr through his, raylahr.com.
I have sent "The Review" to perhaps 100 people with more technical expertise than I, and it has impressed everyone that I have heard from. Unlike the subjunctive dithering of the NTSB report, The Review is declarative and confident and tells its tale with the dense technical poetry of a Patrick O'Brian novel.
According to The Review's author, the first missile, the one that destroyed the plane, was large and, if not un-armed, at least failed to explode. The missile shot above TWA Flight 800, found its mark and descended on it from the rear.
"The missile's momentum was high enough to pitch the nose of the aircraft sharply upward when it landed on the top of the stabilizer," claims the author, "and alter its heading to the right when it hit the body. The missile's supersonic speed caused these changes to occur nearly simultaneously."
The stabilizer is the horizontal part of the tail. The elevator is the movable control on the stabilizer. A hydraulically driven device called the "jackscrew," located in front of the tail, changes the stabilizer's pitch angle, which causes the plane to pitch up or down.
So much information is loaded into the recovered jackscrew that author and Air Force vet Tom Kovach calls it the "Rosetta Stone" of the disaster, "the one piece of the aircraft that proves the high-speed action events that brought down Flight 800."
Apparently, the missile smashed into the stabilizer with more force than the jackscrew could handle, so much force in fact that it ripped the forearm-thick steel of the jackscrew in half. This same force pushed the tail violently down and the nose up and wrenched the plane into an aerodynamic stall. Unable to take the extra stress from the aircraft's sudden up-pitch, the wing tips fractured simultaneously.
The violent upward pitch of the plane whipsawed the fuselage and snapped the rigid keel beam, which runs under the length of the fuselage. The missile meanwhile skipped off the stabilizer and into the right side of the fuselage, which had flipped up nearly vertically and to the right.
The savage force of this combined action ripped the cockpit off of the plane, which, along with the front of the keel beam and the air conditioning units, plunged into the sea before the rest of the plane did the same.
The Review author deduced this in large part from the debris field and physical evidence, like the fractured jackscrew, but there is more evidence, of course, namely the testimony of the eyewitnesses.
From her Fire Island deck, FBI witness No. 150 watched a shiny, cylindrical wingless object move at high speed from north to south. She then noticed the object head toward "a large commercial airliner" traveling east at the same altitude. The airliner "simply 'stopped' at that moment," she told the FBI.
"As the plane came apart, its nose turned up and to the right," her FBI 302 continues. "She could see windows on the top right side of front of the plane, even though she had previously been able to see only along its spine."
"The front was carried forward and arced down with its momentum," the 302 adds. "The right wing seemed to stay with the plane."
Six days after the crash, weeks before any of this information became public, witness No. 150 described the break-up sequence of TWA Flight 800 almost perfectly. She was one of more than 750 eyewitnesses that the FBI interviewed.
Another such witness, No. 551, tracked TWA Flight from his window seat on US Air 217 overhead. He watched the 747 for 30-40 seconds as it flew eastward, its cabin lights still on. Then he saw the front of the plane explode. "The plane seemed to stop in mid air like a bus running into a stone wall – no forward motion," he told the FBI.
The Review author believes that No. 551 was describing the same dramatic stall, a result of the missile impact that No. 150 described, likely the first blow of three. The author does not try to guess the missile's provenance, but he rules out a Stinger or similar shoulder-fired missile. One can infer from what he writes that the lethal missile was likely a product of the U.S. Navy or a NATO ally.
Dwight Brumley, a retired 25-year United States Navy master chief, also watched the incident from US Air 217. He is among those Navy people who believes that if this missile had come off of a sub or a cruiser, "Somebody would talk to somebody about what they knew (or at least suspected)."
Brumley thinks it possible that there was a test of a defensive missile system by a black ops team that went awry. More likely, he speculates, "We were completely caught with our pants down and TWA 800 was just flat out shot down by an unknown missile."
"I just know," Brumley tells me, "that I saw something streaking up toward TWA 800 and that after the initial explosion she never climbed anymore. No 'zoom climb.'"
If someone knows more or different, we would certainly like to hear from him.
Sen. KERRY: Well, it's sad but it's understandable. I mean, there obviously is fear abroad in the land. We have to curb that fear. I think those of us in Washington really have a responsibility here, Chris, to balance our rhetoric and to balance the definitions of this war with the realities of what we face in the country. You know, we've had terrorism for a long time now. We've had the Achille Lauro, the Munich Olympics, the pipe bomb at the Olympics in Atlanta, the TWA 800, the bombing of embassies, and it's not going to disappear overnight.
Thanks for the post. I encounter the same type of people on the JFK threads. The conspiracy theorists never present facts other than their opinions but the people who believe the government's explanations have to report every single angle and timetable.
When the theorists can account for every who, what, where and why, I'll pay attention to them.
Makes you wonder what classified briefings Kerry attended. Ditto for Stephie.
Boeing did. It was part of the fuel quantity indicator system.
By the time Stone got done with the script, Roger Ailes would be the one firing the missile.
Kerry made a similar statement about TWA800 earlier to Larry King Sept 11,2001.
Sen. Kerry:
We have always known this could happen. We've warned about it. We've talked about it. I regret to say, as -- I served on the Intelligence Committee up until last year. I can remember after the bombings of the embassies, after TWA 800, we went through this flurry of activity, talking about it, but not really doing hard work of responding.
We need to do that now and I'm confident that the size of this, the nature of this loss and the nature of this attack are going to motivate everybody to come together to do that. And I think that's imperative.
And so as to not forget, there was a confirmed sighting of a couple of men fumbling with a shoulder mounted device in a field near an airport I think in Maryland before the downing of TWA flight 800
what does rosie odonell say? i believe the same thing she believes.
And before you spout cover up, other Airbus A300/310 aircraft have had their rudder tear loose in flight. The only difference in AA587 was the rudder took the vertical fin off with it.
Of course no amount of facts matter when you already have your mind made up. There could be a video of the whole event and it would be discounted as a government conspiracy.
But over the years some things just don't add up.
If it were a military accident, the number of people involved would have been sizable, and keeping the secret this long, in this day and age where direct information would be very valuable to the media, just does not make sense to me.
If it were a terrorist missile, the cell and it's members were either completely eliminated, or they are remaining mute for no reason that I can understand.
A couple years ago, I was on the conspiracy side of this, but even with all the anecdotal evidence and purported misstatements, there are too many pieces missing to form any conclusion other than what they came up with.
I do not contend that terrorism was NOT responsible, only that it seems unlikely unless all participants, including the trigger-man or suicide bomber are dead.
Geesh...it's not like we're denying we ever landed on the moon or something.
There are wires in my 25gal gasoline tank on my GMC Yukon.
I recall the schematics of the tank for the 800 year model in question, and it had wire runs to the pumps and there were connectors, mush as my SUV's tank is wired. But the pumps are much bigger and in multiples on that aircraft, so it is a matter of scale, and of operating voltage.
Report later came back from inspections by the airlines indicating some wire damage in a few of the ones inspected from mechanic's stepping on them when they serviced the tank. This took years to develop.
I don't know where you got your info, but the tanks of that particular year of manufacture before the modifications were made, did in fact have wiring that was subject to damage in the tank. In my business, we would call that a code violation if non authorized personnel could access them. But it is not really a violation, because that was not the case.
All that tells me that there is little there, there.
Witnesses with specific detail from 25 miles away and no optical aids, make me very suspicious of their accuracy.
The mind tends to fill in the missing information, and I think that is what has happened here.
Heh heh. Maybe. Maybe not. But whatever he took out, it damn sure wasn't all that stuff we already knew about. It's absurd to think Burger would have risked everything to cover up mere administration embarrassments--especially since there were roughly 10 a day for 8 years, and this particular one was already public.
If everything Burger took was, in fact, related to the Millenium Bombing after-action report, then there was stuff in there we didn't know about. Stuff that absolutely could not come to light.
So why was it in the records to begin with? The clintons aren't above cooking the record books. My guess is that, at the time, the info at issue remained because it wouldn't be recognized for what it was. Just something-something with no dots to connect. But in the interim between clinton leaving office and the 9-11 commission, something changed. Something came to light that would make that material blink neon.
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