TWA Flight 800 Was 'Shot Down'
Investigator makes his case in Washington
TWA Flight 800 Investigation
Updates from January 3, 2001 to Present
http://twa800.com/updates.htm
More Flight 800 links updated 7/27/01
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=13123
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=23035
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=23800
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=23815
By Steven Allen
Copyright 1998, WorldNetDaily
WASHINGTON -- "Somebody came into our waters and
shot down -- for the first time ever -- a flag carrier of the United States," an
expert on the explosion of TWA Flight 800 said at a Washington briefing yesterday.
Commander Bill Donaldson, a retired Navy pilot and accident investigator who has spent 15
months examining the case, said that two missiles were fired in the vicinity of the
airplane, and that one of them exploded close enough to bring the plane down. It's no
wonder, he said, that investigators did not find evidence of a direct missile hit; the
missile was of a type specifically designed to explode near (rather than in contact with)
its target.
Flight 800, Donaldson said, "was intentionally destroyed by a powerful, proximity
fused, air bursting, anti-aircraft weapon launched from a position approximately one
nautical mile off shore and three nautical miles east of Moriches Inlet, Long Island, New
York." In addition, the airplane was "engaged seconds later by a second missile
fired from a closer position to the south of [the plane's] track."
There were 230 passengers and crew on board the Boeing 747 when it was destroyed, on the
evening of July 17, 1996. The plane was bound for Paris and, at the time of the explosion,
was eight miles off Long Island.
Government officials have suggested that the plane was brought down when a spark ignited
fumes in a nearly empty fuel tank causing it to explode, but they haven't been able to
explain the source for the spark.
Donaldson based his claims on an analysis of physical evidence and eyewitness accounts,
which he has detailed in a 109-page report (available at http://members.aol.com/fl800/).
Those appearing at the briefing to support Donaldson's theory included a helicopter pilot
who saw the explosion, a man who saw it from the ground, and a now-retired TWA captain who
had served as flight engineer on the same plane just a few hours before, on its flight
from Athens.
Donaldson believes that a missile detonated on the plane's left side, about 20 feet from
the hull and "probably slightly low," sending a shock wave that blew open the
skin on the left wing. The airplane then moved violently to the right and rolled almost
onto its back in an instant, some "144 degrees in one second." The stress
created by the missileexplosion caused the plane itself to explode in bright flash
followed by a dull red-orange fireball that fell to the water amid a cloud of black smoke.
In preparing his report, Donaldson analyzed the composition and distribution of debris
from the plane, interviewed witnesses who claimed to have seen a missile streaking toward
the plane (and turning as if homing in on the plane's radio signals), and examined all the
official documents released in the case. He said that he is apparently "the only
trained accident investigator" who has interviewed most of the witnesses; the FBI
allegedly blocked NTSB investigators from conducting their own interviews.
Among the eyewitnesses who saw what appeared to be a missile attack, Donaldson said, was
an FBI agent. "He said he had seen a plane shot down."
Admiral Thomas Moorer, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, attended the briefing
in support of Donaldson. "This certainly appears to be an act of terrorism,"
Moorer said. He called the Donaldson report "very excellent" and said Congress
should conduct its own investigation of the explosion.
Vernon Grose, a physicist and former member of the National Transportation Safety Board,
attended the briefing as an observer. He said he was interviewed on CNN for six hours the
night of the disaster and has been interviewed on the subject some 170 times. "I've
spent two years defending the NTSB," he said, only to find that the facts don't seem
to line up with the official story. He told WorldNetDaily that he felt
"betrayed" by the NTSB.
The Donaldson briefing "disturbed" him, and he believes that government
officials may have come to a conclusion first, then tried to make the facts fit their
theory. "There ought to be an open, public hearing" to address the points made
by Donaldson and others.
Grose said he's not a fan of conspiracy theories, and he believes there might be a
reasonable explanation for the government's behavior in this case. "But if the truth
contradicts what has been said, let it be heard," he said. At the briefing, Captain
Al Mundo, flight engineer on the same plane on its previous flight, said he finds the
official theory "highly improbable."
After the earlier flight, he had performed a procedure that cleared the center fuel tank.
"I question whether vapors were even in the tank," he said, due to physical
processes that should have cleared any vapors that were present.
The helicopter pilot eyewitness -- Fred Meyer, a lawyer and Vietnam veteran Naval aviator
-- said at the briefing that, "Based on two combat tours, it is my firm belief to
this day that it was military ordnance." The government theory, he said, is "a
government excuse for something -- totally mystifying. I know what I saw."
Richard Goss, a businessman who saw what appeared to be a missile, said that at first he
thought it was part of a fireworks display. "Someone else at the Yacht Club [from
which he saw the incident] even said, 'Look at the fireworks!,' and we waited for the
display." His reaction to the government's version as seen in a CIA-produced computer
simulation: "Personally, it was a joke to me. It was an insult. It was so different
from what I saw."
Donaldson's report is full of tantalizing details.
On the day of the explosion, a Beirut newspaper
received a fax, apparently from an Islamic terrorist group, stating that "Tomorrow
morning we will strike the Americans in a way they do not expect and it will be very
surprising to them." The Flight 800 disaster occurred at 8:31 p.m. EDT -- which, on
the Arabian Peninsula, was the next morning.
On November 17, 1995, eight months before the Flight 800 disaster, two aircraft off Long
Island reported seeing a bright, fast-moving object trailing smoke and not registering on
FAA radar. The object passed within 2,000 to 3,000 feet of the two aircraft.
Radar detected an object, apparently a surface vessel, only 2.9 nautical miles from Flight
800 when it exploded. It was traveling at 30 knots and "avoided the visual range of
all other surface contacts" until it got out of range of Islip radar. "This is a
normal military tactic," Donaldson noted, not the action of someone who had just
witnessed a plane crash.
Donaldson reported that some of the strongest evidence for a missile explosion -- the
drastic change in apparent altitude, speed, and other factors noted by the flight data
recorder (FDR) at 8:31:13 p.m. -- appeared to have been removed from the official version
of the FDR's readout. "The first version of the digital readout of the flight data
recorder the NTSB published on the Internet was correct. It showed [the] data record
ending at the beginning of the 13 second line. The second version, handed to reporters at
the Baltimore Hearings [conducted by NTSB], had the 12 second line penned out. The third
version on the Internet, altered April 8, 1998, has now totally deleted the 12 second
line."
NTSB officials claimed the numbers at the 13 second line are "garbage" akin to
the "snow" that appears on a videotape between a newly-recorded segment and
material that was previously recorded. But that doesn't make sense, Donaldson said,
because the numbers are internally consistent (they relate logically to one another) and
they are within the bounds of possibility (for example, degree measurements all fall
between 0 and 360).
"You'll have a hard time finding an airline pilot, off the record," who believes
the official story, Donaldson said. The NTSB, he said, "has been politicized."
"There is no organized cover-up" in the conspiratorial sense, he said. Rather,
in typical bureaucratic fashion, top officials let the official version be known to the
people under them. In turn, lower-level investigators -- each of whom possessed only
partial knowledge of the facts in the case -- assumed that the higher-ups had a basis for
their theory, and set about to find the facts that would back it up.
But who made the decision that the fuel-tank theory would become the official version?
"You've got to go above the NTSB and above the Justice Department to get the
answer," Donaldson suggested.
c 1998 WorldNetDaily
WORLD NET DAILY - MAJOR NEWS WIRE SERVICES
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======================================================
Aubrac Aubrac@aol.com
[TWA 800] Open Letter to the NTSB
Sun Aug 5 22:39:03 2001
August 4, 2001
Captain Ray Lahr (ret)
Malibu, CA 90265
Mr. Ronald S. Battocchi
General Council
National Transportation Safety Board
490 L'Enfant Plaza East, S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20594-2001
Dear Mr. Battocchi:
Thank you for your response of July 27, 2001.
You may wonder why I persist in seeking the NTSB calculations for
the climb of TWA 800 from 13,800 feet to 17,000 feet. The reason is quite
simple. It was physically impossible for TWA 800 to make that climb. When the NTSB made a computer simulation showing such a climb, there was an error made in entering data into the computer, or the computer program was in error.
Anyone familiar with this type of aircraft knows intuitively that
when a third of the fuselage is blown away, the aircraft will be so out of
balance that it will immediately stall and fall out of the sky. But we don’t need intuition here. We have the Boeing data. The aircraft weighed 574,000 lbs before nose separation. The nose weighed 79,394 lbs. The center-of-gravity (C.G.) was at 21.1% MAC before nose separation. After nose separation it was at 57.8% MAC. That means the C.G. moved from about 1 ft in front of the center-of-lift (C.L.) to about 11ft behind the C.L. This created a huge nose-up torque of about 6,000,000 ft-lbs. The angular moment of inertia was 15,780,000 slug-ft^2. The angular acceleration was .39 radians/sec^2. The aircraft pitched through 45 degrees in two seconds and it kept right on going. The aircraft was stalled at about 25 degrees and was in free fall. The most it could have climbed before the stall was about 200 feet.
In all of that long list of communications that you cited in your
letter, the NTSB has never contested these numbers. Instead, the NTSB hides behind a computer simulation which has never been verified. The NTSB piously pleads that they can’t reveal their calculations because Boeing won’t let them. We don’t even know if Boeing issued sucha dictum. The NTSB has never revealed a document from Boeing stating such a dictum, or even the identity of anyone within Boeing who might have issued such a dictum.
As a lawyer, you are aware that such evidence is not admissible in court. If your opposing attorney tried to submit such evidence, you would
have it thrown out, and the judge would admonish the jury to completely
disregard that evidence in their deliberations.
A remedy that is still available is to actually take this to court, and I suppose it could come to that. But there is no need to make this a court case. The answer is so simple. Let’s get all of the interested parties, including Boeing, around a conference table, and let’s hash this
thing out.
Sincerely,
Cc
Ray Lahr
Open letter
Carol J. Carmody
National Transportation Safety Board
Joseph F. Manno
Federal Aviation Administration
Linda Kuhns
Trans World Airlines, Inc.
Gary R. Graham
International Association of Machinists
Raymond W. Boushie
Crane Company, Hydro-Aire
National Air Traffic Controllers Association
J. Dennis Rodrigues
Boeing Commercial Airplane Group
Michael Cerano
Airline Pilots Association
Richard Parker
Pratt & Whitney
Low Taylor
Honeywell, Inc.===================================================
The Crash of TWA Flight 800
The Ultra-High IQ society, The Mega Foundation, features
Part II of a series on the tragic crash of TWA Flight 800:
Part II presents five animations of witness sketches in the
the official NTSB report, one of which is an exacting life-
like replication that maps exactly onto the account and
sketch of FBI witness 649. This animation is virtually
like downloading the memory-record of eyewitness 649.
Reenforcing the work of independent researchers
such as physicist Thomas Stalcup and Tom Shoemaker,
Part II of the Ubiquity series on TWA 800 shows that
eyewitness sketches contradict the official story. The
eyewitness sketches show that the projectile many of the
witnesses saw streaking toward the crash traveled along
a course opposite to the course of TWA Flight 800, and
thus the projectile cannot be explained, as officials
claim, by witnesses seeing the burning aircraft itself.
REPORT OF CONGRESSMAN JAMES A. TRAFICANT,
JR. TO THE TRANSPORTATION & INFRASTRUCTURE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON AVIATION ON THE TWA FLIGHT
800 INVESTIGATION JULY 15, 1998
http://web.archive.org/web/20010913231155/http://www.house.gov/traficant/twaflight800report.htm
NEW
Download the TWA Report Appendix
Flight 800 Eyewitnesses
The Crash of TWA Flight 800
http://www.UltraHIQ.net/Ubiquity/SprUbiq01/PartII/PartII.htm
Official Crash Investigation of TWA Flight 800
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/TWA800.htm
There were 100's of witnesses that know the CIA and the FBI lied!
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/eyewitnesses.htm
TWA 800: TV TRANSCRIPT
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/800_transcript.htm
TWA 800 - Missile Website Roadmap
http://www.angelfire.com/hi/TWA800/
I don't think a HAARP project downed TWA 800
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/800.htm
TWA Flight 800 Cover-Up
http://www.apfn.org/thewinds/flight800.html
National Security Invoked Re Navy Activity Near Flight 800
http://flight800.org/nat_security.htm
FIRO Complaint Against FBI
http://flight800.org/FBI_COMP.htm
TWA Flight 800 The Four Missing Seconds Analysis from the
Flight Data Recorder
http://flight800.org/FBI_COMP.htm
THE FAMILIES OF TWA FLIGHT 800 ASSOC., INC. http://web.archive.org/web/20011212033728/http://www.charity.com/familiesoftwa800/newslttr.html
MISSILE DOWNED TWA FLIGHT 800?
http://www.spiritoftruth.org/missile.html
THE MYSTERY OF TWA FLIGHT 800
How government stopped probers
Journalist, wife convicted of tampering with evidence
http://web.archive.org/web/20021002164848/http://www.members.iquest.net/~macihms/Government/mystery800.html
TWA Flight 800 passengers
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/passengers.htm
E-Mail: apfn@apfn.org
Last updated on 08/05/2010 08:06 PM