Stingers? Need something with more range than that, to have gotten Flt 800. Now maybe if the USN was having a live fire drill somewhere off the coast. Example, the Ukraine zapped a Russian plane doing that very thing.
Stingers? Need something with more range than that, to have gotten Flt 800.Stingers have a nominal ceiling of 10,000 feet, and TWA 800 was at 13,800. But the stingers are for taking out manueverable targets such as fighters and helicopters. For a 747 lumbering along straight and nearly level, the ceiling is substantially higher.
Why limit the discussion to Stingers? Al-Quaida had access to bigger SAMs, and, with a boat, they could be brought in and launched without being detected. Sure, launching a big SAM would mess up the paint on your Donzi, but as we now know, these people don't care much for their own lives, and would probably risk such an operation, and we know that the people who blew up the Cole spent a long time preparing a boat for that attack.
The eyewitness accounts include reports of people seeing the body of the missle. Seems like it would have to be larger than a Stinger for that to happen, even if it was a glint of sunlight off the missile.
There were also reports of a radar track of a boat (later claimed to have been a helicopter) from near the point where TWA800 blew up. As far as I know, the vessel, whatever it was, was never identified.