It’s not a common event, but 14 fuel tanks have exploded on commercial jetliners.
That’s enough to suggest that one could randomly have exploded within 3 weeks of some terrorist attack. Sure, picking a SPECIFIC terror attack lowers that odds, but you didn’t pick one at random, you picked one that happened within 3 weeks of the explosion.
I could show you hundreds of terror attacks that didn’t happen within 3 weeks of the explosion, which shows that, for any particular terror attack, the odds are it wasn’t within 3 weeks of the TWA explosion.
When the Challenger exploded, the odds of it exploding were also astronomical, if measured by past occurances.
But if you search the literature, you will find that a lot of work has been done both after AND before the TWA explosion to deal with the problem of fuel tank explosions.
So it was something that was a known risk, albeit unlikely.
Unfortunately, unlikely risks sometimes become real accidents.
I use a simpler rule. Given that we can’t keep our most important national security secrets out of the New York Times, the chances that a coverup of the size necessary to hide all the evidence of a missle attack on a jetliner is astronomically small.
Plus, if terrorists were able to blow TWA 800 out of the sky, why are there not other examples of airplanes in the U.S. being blown out of the sky, or any near-misses? Before TWA 800, the chances (as measured by occurance) of a terrorists shooting down an airplane in the US were NIL, MUCH less than the chance of a fuel tank explosion.
But we are to believe that the terrorists successfully blew up a plane with a missle from a boat in 1998, the entire thing was covered up so successfully that nobody in government has leaked it, and the terrorists have never again even tried to repeat the attempt, even though according to the conspiracy buffs we have done NOTHING to protect ourselves from a repeat attack because we refuse to acknowledge it happened the first time.