-Caveat Lector-
all articles
current articles
February 24 - March 2, 1999
by
robert davey Scattered Clues
(photo: AP/ Wideworld) New shadows darken the TWA Flight 800 probe
The elusive ignition source for the extremely rare center tank explosion that
the National Transportation Safety Board believes destroyed TWA Flight 800 on
July 17, 1996, remains a troubling and controversial mystery. Although the
investigation is continuing, the NTSB admits that it may never be able to
explain what led up to the horrifying last moments of the Paris-bound,
25-year-old 747 and her 230 passengers and crew.
But, in truth, the crash left a host of anomalies in its wake. The Voice has
recently uncovered many unexplained elements in the investigation, among them:
a piece of wing debris bearing clues that excited one investigator, a veteran
pilot; a loud sound on the cockpit voice recorder and erratic readings on the
flight data recorder, both suggesting a high explosive blast; hundreds of
eyewitness accounts, finally being examined by the NTSB, of which more than a
hundred suggest that a missile brought down the plane; and, lastly, a
recommended test that investigators failed to carry out.
The wing debris seemingly shatters the NTSB's theory. "You ever shot a .22
through a tin can? You know how the holes look where it punctures the metal
and it rolls the metal back and tears it as it stretches?" the veteran pilot
asked. "Well that's what these holes looked like, except they were oval-
shaped." He was recalling three holes— each at least six inches long by around
three inches high, he said— which had been punched through the thin aluminum
panelling of a structural piece from inside the right wing of the 747. The
holes were punched out "from the airplane toward the wing tip," he added. The
piece, called a rib, came from within the wing's leading edge about five feet
out from the fuselage, he said, where the landing lights would be.
The pilot, an accredited accident investigator, found the piece four days
after the crash while touring the Calverton hangar where the recovered debris
was taken. He spotted Dr. Merritt Birky, a top NTSB scientist who led the
agency's effort to document damage caused by fire or explosion, and carried
the five-foot-by-six-inch rib over to him. "I said, 'Look, I think that these
holes were caused by a high explosion,' " the pilot recalls.
According to the pilot, Birky said it had already been determined that the
holes in the rib were made by impact with the water. Dissatisfied, the pilot
took the piece over to the FBI field lab at Calverton, where technicians gave
him a demonstration of their explosive-sniffing machine. The piece promptly
tested positive for nitrates, a possible sign of explosive residue. Before the
rib was taken off next day for further tests at the FBI's Washington lab,
another crash investigator had a chance to examine the holes. "They were not
caused by water," he told the Voice. (The NTSB did not respond to Voice
queries about the rib. Birky didn't respond to repeated Voice requests for
comment.)
"I do remember a piece in that general vicinity [of the right wing] was of
great interest but on further examination by the [FBI] metallurgists it proved
to be nothing," retired assistant director of the FBI, James Kallstrom,
recently told the Voice from his office at the Delaware bank where he's now
employed. The piece tested negative for nitrates in Washington, Kallstrom
said.
Kallstrom said he couldn't recall details of the investigation. For instance,
a December 1997 report recommended that investigators should fill the inboard
wing fuel tanks of a 747 with water and fire shoulder-launched missiles at
them. Only then could a missile be ruled out as the cause of the crash. (A
spokesman for the NTSB told the Voice the agency does not consider the test
necessary.)
Noting that the "severe shattering of the left wing upper skin" had puzzled
investigators, military expert Richard Bott speculated in the report, obtained
by the Voice, that a missile striking the inboard left wing fuel tank would
create "a significant hydrodynamic ram event" that would account for the
wing's peculiar fragmentation. Some wing pieces were recovered near JFK,
suggesting that they fell from the aircraft in the first moments after the
plane exploded. "You know," Kallstrom said, "there are some things you can't
explain."
Yet while dismissing this evidence Kallstrom seemed at the same time less
emphatic in his rejection of the missile theory than he had during previous
Voice interviews. "Clearly there's a mountain of evidence that says it wasn't
[a missile], and maybe there's a little pile over here that says it was," he
said. Previously he had insisted that there is "not a scintilla" of evidence a
missile was involved.
Whether they amount to "not a scintilla" or part of that "little pile," the
eyewitness accounts remain for many the most vexing element of the TWA 800
story. Kallstrom over a year ago unveiled the CIA video that explained that
the more than 100 witnesses who told of a streak of light ending in an
explosion, fireball, or flash had seen not a missile but the burning plane,
which the CIA thinks climbed steeply after it exploded. But now when Kallstrom
was asked about the eyewitnesses, he said, "Let me say this— to this day I
still believe that the eyewitnesses were reporting what they saw."
Confoundingly, this appears to endorse accounts challenged by both the CIA and
the FBI.
The FBI would not allow NTSB investigators near the eyewitnesses in the early
days of the investigation, but much later transferred a mountain of witness
statements to the NTSB for examination. One member of the NTSB's Witness Group
told the Voice the group began examining the statements last fall and hopes to
finish sometime in March or April, after which, he said, the NTSB will put the
accounts into its TWA 800 public docket and post them on its Web site. This
senior accident investigator said he hopes the group will take a crack at
explaining what the witnesses saw, and does not expect to be constrained by
the CIA's analysis. "If once it's explained it doesn't make sense, I have no
problem going on the record and saying so," the investigator said.
If eyewitnesses really did just imagine they saw a missile, that leaves the
NTSB searching for something that could have ignited the vapor above the 50 or
so gallons of fuel in the huge center tank. Yet the safety board stated last
year that it may never find the ignition source.
That is not surprising, considering the odds it faces. After all, its $30
million investigation was unable to find a single flaw in any of the recovered
aircraft components that could have allowed a spark into the tank. That, in
turn, is no surprise to the man whose familiarity with 747s is second to none.
"When we designed the airplane we did every damn thing we could to make a fuel
tank explosion not happen," said Joe Sutter, the retired Boeing chief engineer
who more than 30 years ago led the 747 design team. Sutter told the Voice,
"There've been thousands of 747s, sitting on the ramp, cooking in violent heat
for hours due to delays, and they've taken off with hot empty tanks hundreds
of thousands of times, so if it happened this way, that was a real freak
accident." (Boeing has built 1200 747s.)
The Flight 800 disaster was truly a freak occurence. As noted in Insight
Magazine (February 8), it is one of two unexplained center tank explosions.
The other was a new Philippine Air Lines 737 that exploded before takeoff in
Manila in 1990— and although a cause for that explosion has never been found,
it is known that the airplane had been modified by the owners since it left
the factory.
To show it has indeed found the cause of the crash, the NTSB has identified a
breakup sequence that it says led in two or three seconds from the center tank
explosion to disintegration of the aircraft, specifically when the nose and
first-class section fell off. But although its investigators determined which
parts of the tank were damaged in the initial explosion, not all those
features were included in the scenario developed by the Sequencing Group. In
addition, the group made no progress toward identifying where in the tank the
explosion may have begun, admitted senior metallurgist James Wildey in his
summary to the Sequencing Report. The breakup sequence, then, remains merely a
best guess for the order in which things happened.
But one expert who examined the report suggested that the burst of energy that
tore the center tank partitions from their rivets, snapped the keel beam
beneath the tank, and ripped apart the fuselage skin may not have come from
inside the tank at all. "If the tank had 50 gallons of water in it, and you
put enough energy into it, it will blow up," said Professor Richard Schile of
the University of Bridgeport. Schile, who has degrees in mechanical and
aeronautical engineering and has worked on failure analysis at Pratt & Whitney
Aircraft, said that in examining combustion in the tank the NTSB may have
missed the main event. "This sounds to me like the pressure rise was a hell of
a lot higher than we think it was and it occurred so rapidly that it just blew
the structure apart," he said. "The fire may have come later and been
incidental."
A sudden increase in pressure would be expected to leave its mark on the
airplane's black boxes. There is a sonic signature at the very end of TWA
800's cockpit voice recording that investigators have described as a very
loud, very abrupt sound. So far, however, the NTSB has barely acknowledged the
sound. To electronics engineer James Cash, who as chairman of the Cockpit
Voice Recorder Group leads the NTSB's study of the sound, that's as it should
be.
"Analysis is never released . . . it's for our internal use," he told the
Voice. But one investigator said that the NTSB has turned down offers from
outside labs to interpret the CVR sound. (The NTSB did not reply to a query
about this.) One member of the CVR group is skeptical that the NTSB has made
any real effort to analyze the sound at all. "It certainly should have been
investigated thoroughly," he said.
Recently, one investigator said, TWA and the Air Line Pilots Association, two
parties to the investigations, have urged the NTSB to say what could have
caused the CVR sound, and to release a report on some tests conducted on a
retired 747 in Bruntingthorpe, England, in the summer of 1997. In one test the
safety board filled the airplane's center tank with propane, exploded it, and
recorded the sound on a CVR. "We need to use the Bruntingthorpe data in our
analysis. I want the data to be published," said one investigator. The CVR
group has not met since the Bruntingthorpe tests, which were finished in
August 1997, he said. The NTSB did not respond to a question about the report
on its Bruntingthorpe tests.
Some independent investigators remain convinced that the wildly erratic
readings included on the last line of data from the flight data recorder,
which the NTSB drew a line through on its FDR Report, also indicate that a
high-pressure wave rocked the airplane (Voice, July 21, 1998). Retired TWA
captain and flight engineer Howard Mann examined an addendum to the FDR
Report, obtained by the Voice, and concluded, "They are not accounting for the
erratic data at all."
These anomalies— the witness accounts, the CVR sound, the damage to the wing
rib, the FDR's last line— all nourish a band of TWA 800 conspiracy theorists,
some of whom still believe that an accidentally fired U.S. Navy missile hit
the plane. A founding member of this group recently got the chance to
scrutinize the wreckage inside the Calverton hangar. Author James Sanders, who
wrote The Downing of TWA Flight 800 and who is awaiting trial on charges of
conspiring to steal evidence from the hangar (Voice, April 21, 1998), was
permitted to photograph the fuselage reconstruction as part of pretrial
discovery. He and his attorney first had to sign an agreement that they would
not share any of the photos with the media, he told the Voice.
Sanders said that after examining the reconstruction he concluded that the
NTSB has given a misleading impression of some of the damage. He mentioned,
for example, a center tank partition that, according to the NTSB, sustained
"accordion" damage, meaning "folding directly inboard" from the direction of
the right wing. But Sanders said that the damage is far more extreme than the
description suggests. "Spanwise beam two is crushed inward about eight feet
from an external force— it's extraordinary when you see it in person," he
said. (The NTSB suggests that the accordion damage was caused by water
impact.)
Retired navy commander William S. Donaldson also is convinced a missile hit
the plane (Voice, July 21), but unwilling to believe the Navy capable of such
a ghastly error, he blames terrorists. He told the Voice recently that an 800
number his group had placed in a Long Island newspaper has drawn an
overwhelming response from eyewitnesses who are not satisfied with the
government's explanation of what they saw.
Tell us what you think. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
all articles
current articles
>From the "Village Voice"
February 24 - March 2, 1999
by
robert davey Scattered Clues
New shadows darken the TWA Flight 800 probe
The elusive ignition source for the extremely rare center tank explosion that
the National Transportation Safety Board believes destroyed TWA Flight 800 on
July 17, 1996, remains a troubling and controversial mystery. Although the
investigation is continuing, the NTSB admits that it may never be able to
explain what led up to the horrifying last moments of the Paris-bound,
25-year-old 747 and her 230 passengers and crew.
But, in truth, the crash left a host of anomalies in its wake. The Voice has
recently uncovered many unexplained elements in the investigation, among them:
a piece of wing debris bearing clues that excited one investigator, a veteran
pilot; a loud sound on the cockpit voice recorder and erratic readings on the
flight data recorder, both suggesting a high explosive blast; hundreds of
eyewitness accounts, finally being examined by the NTSB, of which more than a
hundred suggest that a missile brought down the plane; and, lastly, a
recommended test that investigators failed to carry out.
The wing debris seemingly shatters the NTSB's theory. "You ever shot a .22
through a tin can? You know how the holes look where it punctures the metal
and it rolls the metal back and tears it as it stretches?" the veteran pilot
asked. "Well that's what these holes looked like, except they were oval-
shaped." He was recalling three holes— each at least six inches long by around
three inches high, he said— which had been punched through the thin aluminum
panelling of a structural piece from inside the right wing of the 747. The
holes were punched out "from the airplane toward the wing tip," he added. The
piece, called a rib, came from within the wing's leading edge about five feet
out from the fuselage, he said, where the landing lights would be.
The pilot, an accredited accident investigator, found the piece four days
after the crash while touring the Calverton hangar where the recovered debris
was taken. He spotted Dr. Merritt Birky, a top NTSB scientist who led the
agency's effort to document damage caused by fire or explosion, and carried
the five-foot-by-six-inch rib over to him. "I said, 'Look, I think that these
holes were caused by a high explosion,' " the pilot recalls.
According to the pilot, Birky said it had already been determined that the
holes in the rib were made by impact with the water. Dissatisfied, the pilot
took the piece over to the FBI field lab at Calverton, where technicians gave
him a demonstration of their explosive-sniffing machine. The piece promptly
tested positive for nitrates, a possible sign of explosive residue. Before the
rib was taken off next day for further tests at the FBI's Washington lab,
another crash investigator had a chance to examine the holes. "They were not
caused by water," he told the Voice. (The NTSB did not respond to Voice
queries about the rib. Birky didn't respond to repeated Voice requests for
comment.)
"I do remember a piece in that general vicinity [of the right wing] was of
great interest but on further examination by the [FBI] metallurgists it proved
to be nothing," retired assistant director of the FBI, James Kallstrom,
recently told the Voice from his office at the Delaware bank where he's now
employed. The piece tested negative for nitrates in Washington, Kallstrom
said.
Kallstrom said he couldn't recall details of the investigation. For instance,
a December 1997 report recommended that investigators should fill the inboard
wing fuel tanks of a 747 with water and fire shoulder-launched missiles at
them. Only then could a missile be ruled out as the cause of the crash. (A
spokesman for the NTSB told the Voice the agency does not consider the test
necessary.)
Noting that the "severe shattering of the left wing upper skin" had puzzled
investigators, military expert Richard Bott speculated in the report, obtained
by the Voice, that a missile striking the inboard left wing fuel tank would
create "a significant hydrodynamic ram event" that would account for the
wing's peculiar fragmentation. Some wing pieces were recovered near JFK,
suggesting that they fell from the aircraft in the first moments after the
plane exploded. "You know," Kallstrom said, "there are some things you can't
explain."
Yet while dismissing this evidence Kallstrom seemed at the same time less
emphatic in his rejection of the missile theory than he had during previous
Voice interviews. "Clearly there's a mountain of evidence that says it wasn't
[a missile], and maybe there's a little pile over here that says it was," he
said. Previously he had insisted that there is "not a scintilla" of evidence a
missile was involved.
Whether they amount to "not a scintilla" or part of that "little pile," the
eyewitness accounts remain for many the most vexing element of the TWA 800
story. Kallstrom over a year ago unveiled the CIA video that explained that
the more than 100 witnesses who told of a streak of light ending in an
explosion, fireball, or flash had seen not a missile but the burning plane,
which the CIA thinks climbed steeply after it exploded. But now when Kallstrom
was asked about the eyewitnesses, he said, "Let me say this— to this day I
still believe that the eyewitnesses were reporting what they saw."
Confoundingly, this appears to endorse accounts challenged by both the CIA and
the FBI.
The FBI would not allow NTSB investigators near the eyewitnesses in the early
days of the investigation, but much later transferred a mountain of witness
statements to the NTSB for examination. One member of the NTSB's Witness Group
told the Voice the group began examining the statements last fall and hopes to
finish sometime in March or April, after which, he said, the NTSB will put the
accounts into its TWA 800 public docket and post them on its Web site. This
senior accident investigator said he hopes the group will take a crack at
explaining what the witnesses saw, and does not expect to be constrained by
the CIA's analysis. "If once it's explained it doesn't make sense, I have no
problem going on the record and saying so," the investigator said.
If eyewitnesses really did just imagine they saw a missile, that leaves the
NTSB searching for something that could have ignited the vapor above the 50 or
so gallons of fuel in the huge center tank. Yet the safety board stated last
year that it may never find the ignition source.
That is not surprising, considering the odds it faces. After all, its $30
million investigation was unable to find a single flaw in any of the recovered
aircraft components that could have allowed a spark into the tank. That, in
turn, is no surprise to the man whose familiarity with 747s is second to none.
"When we designed the airplane we did every damn thing we could to make a fuel
tank explosion not happen," said Joe Sutter, the retired Boeing chief engineer
who more than 30 years ago led the 747 design team. Sutter told the Voice,
"There've been thousands of 747s, sitting on the ramp, cooking in violent heat
for hours due to delays, and they've taken off with hot empty tanks hundreds
of thousands of times, so if it happened this way, that was a real freak
accident." (Boeing has built 1200 747s.)
The Flight 800 disaster was truly a freak occurence. As noted in Insight
Magazine (February 8), it is one of two unexplained center tank explosions.
The other was a new Philippine Air Lines 737 that exploded before takeoff in
Manila in 1990— and although a cause for that explosion has never been found,
it is known that the airplane had been modified by the owners since it left
the factory.
To show it has indeed found the cause of the crash, the NTSB has identified a
breakup sequence that it says led in two or three seconds from the center tank
explosion to disintegration of the aircraft, specifically when the nose and
first-class section fell off. But although its investigators determined which
parts of the tank were damaged in the initial explosion, not all those
features were included in the scenario developed by the Sequencing Group. In
addition, the group made no progress toward identifying where in the tank the
explosion may have begun, admitted senior metallurgist James Wildey in his
summary to the Sequencing Report. The breakup sequence, then, remains merely a
best guess for the order in which things happened.
But one expert who examined the report suggested that the burst of energy that
tore the center tank partitions from their rivets, snapped the keel beam
beneath the tank, and ripped apart the fuselage skin may not have come from
inside the tank at all. "If the tank had 50 gallons of water in it, and you
put enough energy into it, it will blow up," said Professor Richard Schile of
the University of Bridgeport. Schile, who has degrees in mechanical and
aeronautical engineering and has worked on failure analysis at Pratt & Whitney
Aircraft, said that in examining combustion in the tank the NTSB may have
missed the main event. "This sounds to me like the pressure rise was a hell of
a lot higher than we think it was and it occurred so rapidly that it just blew
the structure apart," he said. "The fire may have come later and been
incidental."
A sudden increase in pressure would be expected to leave its mark on the
airplane's black boxes. There is a sonic signature at the very end of TWA
800's cockpit voice recording that investigators have described as a very
loud, very abrupt sound. So far, however, the NTSB has barely acknowledged the
sound. To electronics engineer James Cash, who as chairman of the Cockpit
Voice Recorder Group leads the NTSB's study of the sound, that's as it should
be.
"Analysis is never released . . . it's for our internal use," he told the
Voice. But one investigator said that the NTSB has turned down offers from
outside labs to interpret the CVR sound. (The NTSB did not reply to a query
about this.) One member of the CVR group is skeptical that the NTSB has made
any real effort to analyze the sound at all. "It certainly should have been
investigated thoroughly," he said.
Recently, one investigator said, TWA and the Air Line Pilots Association, two
parties to the investigations, have urged the NTSB to say what could have
caused the CVR sound, and to release a report on some tests conducted on a
retired 747 in Bruntingthorpe, England, in the summer of 1997. In one test the
safety board filled the airplane's center tank with propane, exploded it, and
recorded the sound on a CVR. "We need to use the Bruntingthorpe data in our
analysis. I want the data to be published," said one investigator. The CVR
group has not met since the Bruntingthorpe tests, which were finished in
August 1997, he said. The NTSB did not respond to a question about the report
on its Bruntingthorpe tests.
Some independent investigators remain convinced that the wildly erratic
readings included on the last line of data from the flight data recorder,
which the NTSB drew a line through on its FDR Report, also indicate that a
high-pressure wave rocked the airplane (Voice, July 21, 1998). Retired TWA
captain and flight engineer Howard Mann examined an addendum to the FDR
Report, obtained by the Voice, and concluded, "They are not accounting for the
erratic data at all."
These anomalies— the witness accounts, the CVR sound, the damage to the wing
rib, the FDR's last line— all nourish a band of TWA 800 conspiracy theorists,
some of whom still believe that an accidentally fired U.S. Navy missile hit
the plane. A founding member of this group recently got the chance to
scrutinize the wreckage inside the Calverton hangar. Author James Sanders, who
wrote The Downing of TWA Flight 800 and who is awaiting trial on charges of
conspiring to steal evidence from the hangar (Voice, April 21, 1998), was
permitted to photograph the fuselage reconstruction as part of pretrial
discovery. He and his attorney first had to sign an agreement that they would
not share any of the photos with the media, he told the Voice.
Sanders said that after examining the reconstruction he concluded that the
NTSB has given a misleading impression of some of the damage. He mentioned,
for example, a center tank partition that, according to the NTSB, sustained
"accordion" damage, meaning "folding directly inboard" from the direction of
the right wing. But Sanders said that the damage is far more extreme than the
description suggests. "Spanwise beam two is crushed inward about eight feet
from an external force— it's extraordinary when you see it in person," he
said. (The NTSB suggests that the accordion damage was caused by water
impact.)
Retired navy commander William S. Donaldson also is convinced a missile hit
the plane (Voice, July 21), but unwilling to believe the Navy capable of such
a ghastly error, he blames terrorists. He told the Voice recently that an 800
number his group had placed in a Long Island newspaper has drawn an
overwhelming response from eyewitnesses who are not satisfied with the
government's explanation of what they saw.
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