The TWA 800 'investigation' was a sham

Monday, September 18, 2000

Our government would like everyone to accept the decision of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) that TWA Flight 800 was probably destroyed as a result of a spark setting off an explosion in the plane's empty center-wing fuel tank.

Aviation Week, which has gone along with the NTSB's theory, conducted a poll on its web site after the final verdict was handed down at the NTSB board meeting on August 22-23. Some 6,000 people participated in the poll, presumably most, if not all of them, aviation buffs. Two-thirds did not agree with the NTSB's findings as to the cause of the crash.

What would be surprising is that anyone familiar with the evidence in the case did agree with the findings. Modern jet fuel is extremely safe. It has low volatility, and since its introduction there has not been a fuel tank explosion in an airliner that was not caused by an external force such as a bomb. The safety of the fuel is matched by the safety of the tanks. Great care is taken to insure that there is nothing in the fuel tanks that could cause an explosion.

In four years no one could find an ignition source. The NTSB ended up saying that probably high voltage current from a wire bundled with the low voltage wire that goes to a sensor inside the tank somehow penetrated the insulation of both wires and got into the fuel tank creating the spark that caused the explosion. They didn't find any chafing of the insulation on the wires that might have permitted such a transfer. If it had occurred it would have been prevented from entering the tank by transistors and diodes that act as circuit breakers to keep that from happening. The transistors and diodes had not been hit by any such power surge.

The NTSB has no basis whatever for saying that the fuel tank explosion was caused by a flaw in the wiring, but it has succeeded in getting the media to accept this hoax. It rejects the overwhelming evidence provided by hundreds of eyewitnesses that saw a missile intersect with the plane blowing it up.

The NTSB says that none of these eyewitnesses are credible because there is no physical evidence that a missile hit the plane or exploded near it. That is false. James Kallstrom, who headed the FBI investigation said on March 12, 1997, that they could not say that a missile had not hit the plane because they had not recovered enough of the sheet metal where the damage caused by a missile might be found.

That is not the only reason why the claim that there is no evidence of missile damage is false. A nose gear wheel door was broken off as a result of violent pressure from the outside, and the tire was shredded. Both are evidence of high explosive damage. Evidence of explosive residue was found both inside the cabin and on the leading edge of the right wing. The FBI claimed that the residue inside the cabin was left there in a training exercise for an explosive-sniffing dog that had been conducted in that plane. It has been proven that the test was in a plane parked at the St. Louis airport near the aircraft that became TWA 800, not in it.

The FBI crime lab claimed that 10 of the 12 positive hits on the wing that were detected by the highly reliable Egis equipment were false positives. That still left two that were explosive residue that have to be explained. Moreover, Dr. Frederick Whitehurst, the FBI's foremost explosives expert who was responsible for the FBI adopting the Egis equipment, has said that the crime lab failed to use the proper procedures to verify or reject the results. Whitehurst is famous for having blown the whistle on incompetent and sloppy work at the FBI crime lab.

The TWA 800 Eyewitness Alliance is campaigning to force the government to recognize the validity of the evidence provided by the eyewitnesses who saw a missile or missiles shoot down the plane. Ads that they have run in The Washington Times exposing the lies told by the NTSB, the FBI and the CIA about the accident have generated a positive response from the public. One of the most interesting came from an unidentified NTSB employee who said that most of the bad decisions about the eyewitnesses were made by Dr. Bernard Loeb, the chief of accident investigation for the NTSB. It was Loeb who decided early on that the cause of the accident was a spontaneous explosion in the fuel tank. His critic said, "The investigation would not have gotten to this point if it had been done fairly and objectively, but it seems that Dr. Loeb decided to make the decisions for everybody."

This is not the only NTSB employee who knows that the findings are wrong. If Congress were to subpoena them, others would probably blow the whistle on this costly, politicized, botched investigation.

Reed Irvine is chairman of Accuracy in Media.