Except that:
(1) When doing live fire exercises, everything from missle prelaunch, to launch, to tracking the flight, to target acquisition, to hit (or miss) is recorded in multiple places on the ship and with the "umpires" who are running the exercise.
(2) The fire control team, the radar operators, and the bridge would know damn quick if that happened. And so would the umpires. And word would go through the crews mess like lightning. Heck, there are always extra guys hanging around - running coffee, manning the phones, etc. No way could they keep it quiet. Not possible.
(3) There is no "top secret" quick we screwed up pull out the "cover up" manual. The exercise would be terminated immediately, the umpires would be calling up one chain of command and the ship would be calling up another. Word would go out to the Coast Guard pretty damn quick. And the ship would immediately go charging out to see if there were any survivors at flank speed.
Nope. No way it was a live fire exercise mistake. That is tin hat stuff.
If TWA Flight 800 was brought down by a missile, then I am quite certain that it was not terrorists who had done it. The presumption that it was a missile is based on the numerous eyewtiness accounts from various points on the south shore of Long Island that evening.
If a surface-to-air missile was the cause, there are a couple of points to consider, all of which weigh heavily against a terrorist act:
1. TWA Flight 800 was flying beyond the range of any smaller, portable surface-to-air missiles.
2. Not only that, but Flight 800 would normally have been flying several thousand feet higher at that point in its eastbound departure from JFK International Airport (more on that later). There is no way someone could have predicted that it would be flying at that altitude that evening, so a terrorist who was interested in shooting the plane down would have attempted to do so from a point much further east.
3. Terrorists are not just interested in destruction -- they are interested in highly-publicized destruction that draws a lot of attention. As with #2, this would be a likely motivation for a terrorist to do something like this in a place where the "results" were more visible and could not be deliberately mis-identified as an "accident."
(Along these lines, ask yourselves what would have happened if only one passenger jet was flown into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. I'd bet a paycheck that if this had happened, we'd be talking right now about the NTSB's finding that "faulty navigation equipment" on board the aircraft had caused it to fly into the building.)
4. This sounds counter-intuitive, but a 747 or any large passenger jet is actually harder to bring down with a surface-to-air missile than a fighter jet is (remember the near-miss of that El-Al flight back in December -- even though that plane had just taken off and was flying well within the range of even a second-rate missile?).
. . . .
I'm recalling a lot of these things from memory, but in all of our discussions here on FR there were a few items that definitely pointed toward a possible military involvement here:
1. The U.S. Navy uses a grid system to identify areas where naval exercises are held. The grid section immediately south of where Flight 800 went down (if I recall correctly, it is identified as "W-73" or something like that) was "active" that night. It took the Navy a long time to admit that.
2. The U.S. Navy also took many months to identify the correct number and locations of all its ships that were in the area that evening. Even now, a review of some surface radar data from that night shows at least one ship that has never been identified (this fact has led some to speculate that perhaps there were ships from other NATO countries involved in the exercise that night).
3. There is actually one major discrepancy in some of the eyewitness accounts of the "rising object" that was seen that night. The accounts indicate some confusion about where the object was actually seen in the sky, but all of the accounts place the object in one of two locations. This strongly supports the possibility that there were actually two objects involved -- a surface-to-air missile and a target drone.
4. There is a very plausible explanation for why such an accident would occur. The naval exercises were being held in an area where eastbound flights out of JFK International Airport would normally be flying beyond the range of the weapons that were being tested that night. Flight 800 had been ordered to reduce its altitude by several thousand feet just before the incident occurred to make way for a northbound flight (USAir, I believe) into Providence, Rhode Island that was behind schedule that night.
5. A variation of Sherlock Holmes' "dog that didn't bark" case is probably the most damning evidence. Related to Item #2 in this list -- the U.S. Navy vessels identified from the radar data that night began moving away from the area immediately after Flight 800 went down. This action in and of itself would be entirely inconsistent with the response of the U.S. Navy to a terrorist shoot-down of a passenger flight -- they would have pursued whoever fired the missile.
The most compelling argument came from one guy who not only laid out these facts, but seemed to have a pretty good idea what kind of ordnance was being tested that night -- a new anti-aircraft missile that tracks its target not by tracing the heat of the aircraft's engines, but by tracking the aircraft's constant radio signal. And the missile in question has a unique characteristic that seems to match the evidence found in the wreckage very closely -- instead of exploding like a typical missile, it contains a warhead that detonates near the target and throws off a cloud of tungsten-carbide cubes or pellets, shredding the skin of the aircraft from the outside.