-Caveat Lector-
http://twa800.com/news/ww11-15-99.htm
Going After Boeing
Washington Weekly – November 15, 1999
By EDWARD ZEHR
The Seattle Times recently took the Boeing company to task for engaging in "a quiet
pursuit of far-fetched theories" regarding the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 It
seems that the company incurred the stern disapproval of the newspaper which noted
that "Boeing has actually refused to rule out a bomb or missile in the July 1996 TWA
crash." How gauche of Boeing not to snap to attention, click heels and salute smartly
when the government barks an order. Once more our vaunted "free" press show themselves
to be the government's obedient, fawning bootlickers. (With a few honorable
exceptions, such as the Riverside Press-Enterprise, which reported on the glaring
discrepancies in the government's account of the crash early on).
With all possible due deference to the editorial writers at the Seattle Times, who
seem to have bestowed themselves honorary qualifications as aerospace experts almost
as freely as Oxford cloaked its errant, one-time scholar, Bill Clinton, with an
honorary doctorate as a consolation
prize for the one he failed to earn as a student there, what actual qualifications do
they have to utter definitive opinions on so technical a subject? Do they really
imagine that they are better qualified than Boeing's engineers to understand the
subject matter? Ah, but Boeing has a vested interest in avoiding possible liability
for the crash -- they are being sued by family members of some of the crash victims. I
might add that an inveterate, kneejerk-liberal rag such as the Seattle Times also has
a vested interest in covering up possible malfeasance by Clinton administration
officials who have played fast and loose with the crash investigation from the very
outset.
According to the November 8 Progressive Review, Boeing is presently "conducting
chemical metallurgical tests, [and] reviewing FBI interviews with witnesses, many of
whom saw something apparently streaking towards the plane before the crash."
Yes, it would be nice to know why more than a hundred eyewitnesses saw something
streaking towards the plane just before the crash if, in fact, nothing was streaking
towards the plane -- you know, abstruse technical considerations such as that.
Occasionally I get e-mail from people who wish to know why I sometimes inject
psychological considerations into my commentary. The answer is, I do it because our
present political dementia cannot be fully explained using logical considerations
alone. I would cite, for example, the low comedy of hardcore administration supporters
on Usenet (sort of the low-rent district of Internet) trying desperately to make sense
of the fantasy leaked by government "investigators" to their pals in the mainstream
media. The hallucination in question had to do with an "explanation" of the light seen
streaking up toward the aircraft as streams of fuel from the plane's ruptured tanks
which were somehow ignited and burned from the bottom up, appearing to those on the
ground as the glow of a missile streaking up towards the plane.
Now, anyone who would believe so preposterous an "explanation" as that must have
flunked high school physics. (Who takes physics in high school any more? It's far too
difficult for the little sweethearts -- that's why our engineering and physical
science graduate schools are chock-a-block with foreign students these days). Not that
there is anything particularly technical about this issue. Even an individual so
technically dim as a mainstream anchor person should be able to understand it,
although none of them seemed to get it. Anyone with so much as half a brain and a
smidgen of common sense ought to be able to figure out that fuel ejected into the
atmosphere from a ruptured tank at hundreds of miles per hour is going to atomize and
vaporize, not fall towards earth in neat little stream while trailing along behind the
aircraft at full speed like a faithful little puppy dog. How did the Times
characterize Boeing's investigation -- "a quiet pursuit of far-fetched theories"? I !
wonder if their editorial writers are familiar with the Arab expression, "to strain at
a gnat and swallow a camel"?
As a one-time aerospace engineer with 35 years of experience, I guess the thing that
bothers me most about TWA-800 is the number of aerospace professionals who simply do
not believe the government's version of the mishap. Unfortunately, the writers at the
Seattle Times seem to lack the intellectual honesty and personal integrity to
acknowledge this, although they are certainly in a position to know about it. Instead
of seeking the truth, they set about disinforming the public using snide innuendo,
unsupported by verifiable facts, shrill name-calling (e.g. "paranoid conspiracy
theorists") and very little else. All of this is done in pursuit of a smelly little
hidden agenda which these "journalists" are too dishonest to acknowledge. I wonder if
they really understand how ugly a picture they are painting of themselves?
I have talked to airline captains who regard the government's version of the TWA-800
mishap as utter nonsense. One of these pilots told of the many takeoffs he had made
from Saudi Arabia under temperature conditions far more stringent than those
experienced by the TWA aircraft at JFK on the evening of the crash. This pilot
reckoned that if the Boeing 747 did indeed have a design flaw such as the one
postulated by government investigators he would have died a hundred deaths. Be that as
it may, there is only one recorded instance of a heavy Boeing commercial aircraft
having a fuel tank explosion in flight and that one was using highly volatile military
aviation fuel. Thus, on a purely statistical basis, the probability of the
government's explanation of the mishap being correct is vanishingly remote. And yet
the technological dumbbells at the Seattle Times have the temerity to demand that we
all bow low to the government's dubious decree. That is what one expects of people who
a!
re guided by illogical motives of which they seem blissfully unconscious.
In a recent interview, former Navy Commander Bill Donaldson, who has investigated the
TWA-800 crash for two years on behalf of the Associated Retired Aviation
Professionals, noted that 26 other transport aircraft worldwide have been shot down
"by a man-portable anti-aircraft missile." Thus there is nothing the least bit unique
in the concept that the TWA flight was intercepted by such a missile. It was well
within range of some of the more advanced shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons, and
the eyewitness sightings are consistent with such a
missile being fired at the aircraft. A Lufthansa cargo jet was fired at with such a
weapon in September, near Karachi airport in Pakistan.
But gosh, that doesn't jibe with the official version of events. Doesn't that mean
that Donaldson must be a "paranoid conspiracy theorist"? Bill Donaldson is a retired
Navy pilot with "more than 24 years of experience in virtually all phases of naval
aviation." Among his other qualifications, Donaldson lists "graduation from the Navy's
Postgraduate Aviation Safety School in Monterey, California, where I completed the
long course in aviation safety and crash investigation. I have served as a safety
officer and crash investigator at both the Squadron and Air Wing levels, and was
qualified as a maintenance check pilot in six models of prop and jet aircraft Also, I
am a qualified air traffic controller and served for two years as a Carrier Controlled
Approach Officer." I would be interested to know what the technical qualifications of
the editorial staff at the Seattle Times are to address this subject with such implied
omniscience. If, as I suspect, they have none, I wonder wheth!
er they have ever bothered to get the opinions of people with the technical expertise
to speak knowledgeably on the subject. If not, what qualifies them to hurl
unsupported, puerile insults at people who do have the technical expertise to address
the subject? Is this something
they were instructed to do in the PC playbook? The problem with too many "journalists"
today is that they are mal-educated, indoctrinated, opinionated far beyond their
ability to comprehend and sorely lacking intellectual integrity.
Commander Donaldson recently gave interviewer John F. McManus his own version of the
TWA-800 crash:
"I believe that a shoulder-launched missile was fired from a small boat
positioned less than three nautical miles to the southeast of the aircraft. The
missile punched through the underside of the aircraft at a point where the left wing
meets the fuselage. Its warhead, a type that explodes immediately after impact,
penetrated approximately three additional feet into the six-foot-deep tank of fuel in
that wing.
The resulting explosion caused a massive over-pressurization of all three
left-wing tanks blowing open the top skin of the wing. The explosion also impacted the
empty center fuel tank, resulting in a secondary fuel/air explosion under and in that
center tank. All of this led to catastrophic failures of the nose, tail, and left
wing. The plane's pieces, plus the passengers and crew, then plunged into the sea in
about 30 seconds."
Donaldson characterized the FBI's investigation as a "token effort," noting that his
own investigation located 20 eyewitnesses the FBI had not even interviewed. Donaldson
claims that, "Some of these persons were critically important eyewitnesses, people who
were in boats and were first on the scene and who claim to have seen other suspicious
boats in the area."
The Commander also noted that the FBI had the Navy's China Lake [California] Naval Air
Weapons facility study recovered debris from the crash -- until the Navy experts
recommended that missiles be fired into 747 fuel tanks in an effort to replicate the
damage patterns observed in
the debris. At that point the FBI quickly terminated its investigation.
The CIA even got into the act with an animated cartoon purporting to show what
happened to the aircraft after "the fuel tank exploded." It was laughed out of court
by aviation professionals, and I shouldn't wonder. The CIA version claimed that the
aircraft climbed 3,000 feet after the nose fell off.
Intrigued by the notion, I ran some numbers on it and even did a small rudimentary
flight simulation that indicated the aircraft might have ballooned less than a
thousand feet, using the most favorable assumptions. Yes, I used to do aircraft
simulations professionally back in the days before Pontius was a pilot (as they used
to say in the RAF). Those were the days before you could buy one off the shelf at
Toys-R-Us, which is to say sometime before the Flood.
I am told that another engineer ran some numbers that indicate the aircraft might have
climbed a bit more than a thousand feet. (Simulating the flight of aircraft that are
disintegrating is not a very exact science). I bent over backwards to make my
assumptions conservative, which is what any engineer would do. Nevertheless a lot of
people assume that I cooked the figures. Let them assume what they will, I can assure
you that there is no way anybody, using reasonable assumptions, could massage those
numbers enough to get that aircraft up by anything like 3,000
feet in its lugubrious condition. The CIA cartoon show was sheer fantasy.
I am also told that the altitude estimates were based on radar data rather than flight
dynamics considerations. If so, it is possible that the data is spurious. This sort of
thing is not unknown -- radar sometimes shows things that aren't there. For example,
the flight data recorder recovered
from the Egypt Air Flight 990 crash site does not confirm previously described radar
data. (An ominous report surfaced on Friday that fisherman close to the site where the
crash occurred heard two loud "booms" just before the aircraft plunged into the sea.
I'll get to that another time).
Commander Donaldson conducted his own tests on the Jet-A fuel used by TWA-800. He
maintains that you can't even light it with a match unless it is heated to at least
127 deg F. In 1997 he extracted some fuel from a 747 whose engines had been running
for about the same length
of time as those of TWA-800 when the mishap occurred. The fuel's temperature was only
68 deg F. Donaldson described what he did next:
"Then, I took the fuel home, poured some into a pan sitting in my outdoor
barbecue, and placed three lighted fireplace matches into the pool of fuel. The
matches went out! Yet this is the fuel that, under the very same temperature
conditions, supposedly exploded because of some mysterious spark and brought the plane
down. Impossible! Even if you heat the fuel beyond 127 and stick a match in it, you'll
get fire but no explosion."
The point of the exercise is that commercial aviation fuel is designed to burn in the
engine, not in the tank. The government's explanation of a "fuel tank explosion" is a
real stretch. If there were even a remote possibility of this happening there should
have been a lot more such incidents
considering the number of 747 takeoffs there have been under far more adverse
conditions.
A telling point was made when James Sanders, who was criminally prosecuted by the
government for helping to expose the fraudulent nature of the mishap investigation,
was allowed to photograph the debris of TWA-800 in preparing his defense. At
Donaldson's request, Sanders "took close-up photos of the area where the left side
wing fuel tank meets the fuselage, and the underneath part of the fuselage below the
center fuel tank. It is here in this tank that the government said the crippling
explosion took place."
Guess what? One of Sanders' photos showed the bottom of the center fuel tank to be
"domed upward 14 inches" If the fuel tank had simply exploded as the government
maintains, "that metal surface should be domed downward, the result of an explosion
inside the tank," said Donaldson quite plausibly. Which raises an exceedingly
troubling question: has the government told us the truth about what its investigators
have found in the debris? Seen in this light, the inane prattle of the Seattle Times
editorial writers pales into insignificance. Those guys really don't know anything --
they talk just to hear their own words reverberate in the hollow round of their skulls.
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