Rebuilt Flight 800 teaches air safety

[JayS]

May 4, 2004, 7:35PM
Rebuilt Flight 800 teaches air safety
Section of 747 moved to NTSB school
By LESLIE MILLER
Associated Press
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/2549531


ASHBURN, Va. -- A 93-foot section of TWA Flight 800, which blew up in 1996, has been reassembled and now serves as a teaching tool for air crash investigators.

The National Transportation Safety Board rebuilt a section of the 225-foot Boeing 747-100 in a hangar in Calverton, N.Y., as part of its investigation into the accident.

The reconstructed remains have been moved to a college campus, part of the newly created NTSB Academy in Washington's northern Virginia suburbs.

Through peeled-off sections of the aircraft's skin can be seen rows of seats, many intact, that conjure images of the 230 people who perished minutes after takeoff from Kennedy Airport on a July 17, 1996, flight to Paris.

*SNIP*

[FubarFly]

1. .

.

[Red State Rebel]

2. I know a retired TWA Pilot....

He actually flew flight 800 into New York from Paris not long before the crash. He said that he and every other pilot he knows says the NTSB theory on this is bullsh*t. They all believe firmly that it was a missle of some sort.

[Larkspur]

5. Well, Richard Clarke in his book talks about TWA 800 and

he said that it was not a terrorist attack. There was no intelligence reports warning of an attack prior to the accident, and Clarke, the counter-terrorist czar, talked with FBI and NTSB investigators during the investigation and they said that the pitting on the metal found indicated a fuel-type explosion.

Sometimes explosions are not terrorist-made. However, in his book, Richard Clarke does cite coincidences with Terry Nichols and Islamic terrorism. Clarke said that after Nichols' trip to the Phillipines, Nichols became a better bomb maker and a few weeks priot to the OK City bombing, there was an Islamic Religious Convention in OK City, which had some very controversial leaders attend. But the coincidences could not be verfied with facts to prove that Islamic terrorists helped train Nichols.

[Red State Rebel]

7. I'm really not sure...

His perspective was very interesting. We talked at length one night. He had flown that aircraft for years and lost dear friends in the incident. He just said that none of the pilots that flew that aircraft believed it.

[Castor Troy]

3. I wonder why they would be covering it up?

It seems to me that if it were terrorists or something, that the government would not be trying to cover it up.

[JayS]

4. I can see some justification for a coverup. If it were to become...

...known that terrorists were hanging out and knocking down airplanes with missiles it would not do wonders for the travel/airline industry, or the U.S. Government, and would give the terrorists the limelight they want.

[bbmykel]

6. Many believed it was a US missile gone awry

There is some sort of base there on Long Island and they were having a test or wargame the same evening as the crash of Flight 800.

The government would most certainly cover that up if it were the case.

[Merlin]

8. That's correct. That is the prevailing, supportable theory.

The author who wrote a supressed book documenting this has proven, beyond any doubt in my mind, that's exactly what happened. The evidence is overwhelming.

When the NTSB held their notorious public hearings in Baltimore, the FBI put out an APB for that author two days before the hearings began so as to prevent him from appearing. They charged him with stealing evidence because he acknowledged in his book that one of the investigative team members gave him a small swatch of material from one of the seats--material which was stained the same color orange that is emitted by a specific type of rocket fuel--and which he had analyzed to prove that's precisely what it showed.

It was a cover-up of major dimensions.

[Vitruvius]

9. The 747 has a design life of 15 years. Flight 800 was a 25-year-old junker

and blew up because some old wiring created a spark in the wrong place OR because an aged fuel pump overheated and served as the ignition source.