Posted on 01/08/2009 8:18:40 PM PST by Sioux-san
Last week, I received an email from a former 747 pilot named Thomas Young.
In early August 1996, Young explained, he was laid up in a Hong Kong hospital with a back injury. His employer, Polar Air Cargo, flew his wife Barbara out to join him. They had little else to do but watch TV. Here is what they saw.
The videotape began with people milling about on a deck facing a body of water. In the background, a streak of†light can be seen leaving a point below the edge of the deck, accelerating as it climbed; it passed behind what appeared to me to be a thin cloud layer and continued upward out of the frame, from right to left. As the streak of light disappeared beyond the edge of the frame, after a slight pause, there is a generalized, dim flash on the upper left side of the screen, followed by a brighter and more pronounced flash.
Some 270 eyewitnesses on Long Island would give formal accounts to the FBI of the same event--an apparent missile attack on TWA Flight 800 on the night of July 17,1996. Scores of them would provide detailed drawings.
“The TWA 800 story was big news,” Young explains, “and was getting top billing in the Asian press.”
Young had a distinct perspective on what he was seeing. For six years in the 1980s he had worked at Boeing, much of that time in its Space and Strategic Missile Systems Division.... Given the TV reception in his Hong Kong hospital, Young could not identify the type of missile that took out TWA Flight 800, but he was confident he was seeing a missile.
“If this was a Navy missile,” Barbara recalls her husband telling her at the time, “there goes Clinton’s re-election.”
(Excerpt) Read more at cashill.com ...
Just the CEO of TWA at the time... he ended up living a pretty cush life after that. I worked for TWA at the time of the 800 shoot down and worked the 800 info desk as it was all being sorted out. You know, “was my son/daughter/wife/etc on that flight that got shot down?” type of questions.
No kidding. As if that aluminum can was going to continue to fly, much less climb, after the entire forward third of the fuselage was gone.
That had to suck.
Not more than a week ago, I was called an idiot by “Carl from Marietta”, a long-time Freeper, for daring to voice the opinion that flight 800 was a terrorist attack. Obviously there are conflicting positions on this at FR.
I really hate being called an idiot.
Sandy Berger turned the job down and Panetta was the last man standing.
Now, if we could only get that film posted on Youtube. Even so, would anyone care?
Having said that I think TWA 800 stinks to high Heaven
Agree.
If it was a center fuel tank wire or an overheated A/C unit, those babies would be popping like popcorn on a hot tin roof.
Someday the truth will come out.
Oh, and the November, 2001 plane that went down off Rockaway beach—that was another terrorist attack. The shoe bombber Reid was caught less than a month later in flight.
A very liberal friend of mine assures me the missile came from an Army Reserve base in New Jersey. She refuses to tell me how she knows this.
I am a bat
ping pong
Yeah it did, especially since I had just come out of training. Some of our people had to be forcibly removed from the phones after they had been there more than 24 hours straight. It was the only company I ever worked at that inspired that level of loyalty. Sadly, it wasn’t enough.
When American bought us out, I ran into the CEO at the time, who had been a carreer Captain there and he teared up talking about that and the buyout. Yeah I miss the hell out of it. I think he knew that, no matter what AA promised, TWA was dead and the TWA family was going to be dumped. 9/11 was just a convienient excuse to them.
Yes, I remain bitter.
"The explosion was just forward of the middle, below the floor of the passenger compartment, below row 23. But it wasn't a bomb," he [the technician] added. "See the pitting pattern and the tear. It was a slow, gaseous eruption, from inside."
"What's below row 23?" I asked, slowly sensing that this was not what I thought it was.
"The center line fuel tank. It was only half full, might have heated up on the runway and caused a gas cloud inside. Then if a spark, a short circuit ..." He indicated an explosion with his hands.
Wow, Clarke's book reads like a bad movie script...
>> A very liberal friend of mine assures me the missile came from an Army Reserve base in New Jersey. She refuses to tell me how she knows this.
If you mean it was launched from NJ, that’s rather far from the incident.
Snow job.
A fuel-air explosion from JP fuel does not cause pitting in metal. That requires a much higher VOD... Think about it: if a single fuel-air combustion eroded metal, the lifetime of a diesel piston would be next to nothing...
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