I wonder if it's possible to launch a Stinger from underwater with a few to no modifications.
Here's a few synchronistic facts.
MidEastern men recently purchasing rebreather or 'bubbleless' SCUBA gear in Florida.
One of the 911 hijackers reports himself immediately prior to 911 that e's training in aviation and underwater skills.
Iranian terrorist training employs skills in shoulderfired AA missile and SCUBA.
Skill sets of assymetric warfare involving Al-Quada generally imply enemy personnel conducting the acts have less than graduate level engineering experience, but WTC collapse implies graduate level engineering design of an innovative nature in mechanical/aeronautical power/forces.
USN had a significant presence on the surface/subsurface area below the TWA 800 incident vicinity, which dispersed soon thereafter.
Highly unlikely USN was covering up its own malfeasance if it fired a missile simply by nature of military structure, and command and control limitations in highly visible scenarios. However, if USN was reacting to intel foreknowledge in search of unknown particular threat, their presence would be nicely explained and lack of knowledge throughout also nicey explained.
Subsurface area within 1st atmosphere in slightly choppy waters might provide sufficient skip zones and noise to remove positive sonar detection of near surface swimmers. Even if not an actual measurement, sufficient uncertainty exists to encourage this as an avenue of possible approach for an enemy underwater swimmer.
An important note: Even if generally not possible with an off the shelf Stinger, few environments exist in the US military for sufficient latitude to toy, field engineer, modify, or tinker with Stingers to develop such a weapon. Even in project management of such weapons, it's likely that such an idea would be developed first by concept study and engineered design, then prototyping, rather than hands-on tinkering until a new state of the art was created. However, in asymetric warfare, it is very likely that weapons such as Stingers might be tinkered with by amateurs with sufficient functional knowledge and wherewithal to develop such tactical innovation with little to no budget or identifiable overhead/or significant logistics trail.
Considering movies of underwater sub launches of Polaris missiles are fairly prolific and probably identifiable as a signature of US might, and availability of Stingers if it exists to Al-Quada from past mid-east associations, even if this hasn't happeed, I suspect it's a reasonable expectation of the skillsets of such an enemy.
Obviously the above needs substantial research and quantification before it might be plausible entertained as the answer to TWA800. When I observed the synchronicity of such a scenario nicely explaining events and also consistant with human character of all the parties reporting eyewitness accounts on a missle theory, but deafening silence of the authorities even where obvious credible eyewitness reports are discarded, the more consistent this possible scenario seems to withstand.
Anybody else out there ever see this possible theory in a CT thread or similar for disproof or confirmation?
I would be *very* surprised if this was the case. Navy ships conducting these sort of operations would have to tell the crew something... maybe not exactly what they were looking for, but that they were looking for something or other. If, while on such a mission, a plane were to explode almost right above them, there are many (but no BM's) who would put two and two together and, again, word would leak out that the Navy was in the area looking for 'something' at the time the missle attack occurred.
I have not heard this to be the case, so I don't think the Navy had any idea that there was something going on. It is possible, though unlikely, that a ship's Captain could simply arrange for his ship to be doing a random patrol in the area and not tell the crew to do anything different than standard routine, but, if so, it would greatly reduce the point of their being there in the first place: Captains don't look through Big Eyes and neither do most officers.
So, to summarize, I don't think the Navy had anything to do with the downing of Flight 800, not even through suspicion or vague warnings from on high.
Tuor