This is problematic for two reasons. First, that is right at the altitude limit of most MANPAD systems of the time. That would mean the launching platform would have to be directly under the aircraft and fire just about straight up. Possible, but not likely.
If you were planning to bring down a 747, don't you think you'd put your team in a position more inside the engagement envelope?
That brings up the second point. If I remember correctly, -800 was too low. At that point in the departure path, it should've been at a higher altitude. It was held down for some inbound traffic or some such. So even if you were planning on a max altitude engagement, you wouldn't put your team there, because at that point departing airliners should have already been too high.
So a missile team wouldn't have been there, and (probably) wouldn't have engaged something right at the limits of their system. It was just luck that -800 was at that altitude at that position. You don't plan for luck. A terrorist team would've been someplace else.
I don't buy the Navy shoot-down theory either. I know for a fact the Navy is forbidden from generating a fire control solution on commercial aircraft, and they would never in a million years illuminate one with the X band terminal guidance radar. Without either of those engagement elements, there's no way a semi-active radar homing missile would've found it's way into -800.
Of course, I don't really buy the official line either. Have there been any cases of modern airliners' fuel tanks exploding? Sure it is possible, but is it even remotely probable? I honestly don't have a theory as to what happened to -800, but there are some things I'm pretty sure didn't happen to it.
But as we now know a good portion of these terrorists are betting on Forest Gump luck.
When the FAA attributed the explosion to the fuel tank, they made no recommendations on how to prevent it from happening again. They didn't even do an inspection of the rest of the fleet.
When Al Gore put together the committee to investigate the explosion, he included two family members of victims from the Lockerbie bombing. This was after the FAA had made the determination it was a spark in the fuel tank.
The final report focused exclusively on preventing terrorist attacks and hijackings. Why would a committee investigating a mechanical failure focus on terrorist activities? If I had a committee investigating falls in the bathroom, I'd be surprised if they came back with recommendations for putting burglar bars on the windows.
George Stephanapoulos, who was in the Clinton White House when TWA 800 went down, accidentally referred to it as the TWA 800 bombing on a show.
A lot of things can be disputed, but the first three points I mentioned are on the net, and can be Googled. Here's the quote from Stephanopoulos:
Stephanopoulos, implying that this was unnecessary, made this surprising statement: “There are facilities in the White House, not the normal situation room, which everyone has seen in the past, has seen pictures of. There is a second situation room, behind the primary situation room, which has video conferencing capabilities. The director of the Pentagon, the defense chief, can speak from a national military command center at the Pentagon. The Secretary of State can speak from the State Department, the President from wherever he is, and they’ll have this capability for video conferencing throughout this crisis. In my time at the White House it was used in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, in the aftermath of the TWA Flight 800 bombing, and that would be the way they would stay in contact through the afternoon.”That last one could be a slip, but the US government has, for years, denied any Islamic terrorism unless it was so blatant there was no way they could deny it. To this day, they refuse to discuss the evidence in Oklahoma City.