9 thoughts on “The TWA Whistleblower”

  1. tragic incident. while the article tells an interesting story, I struggle to accept that the compliment on the Carr (crew of around 220) and the rest of the battle group (the TR alone had nearly 6000 on board) including those in the air would all maintain silence about this. Yes, I understand that only a fraction of that number could have direct knowledge of what happened, but word spreads like wildfire in this kind of event.

    1. I’m with you. I would think a live fire drill with missiles in the air would attract a good deal of attention from all parts of the fleet. Only one military person has the moral courage to say, “hey, I remember being in the area, firing missiles in the air, and it was the same time as that airliner blowing up.” I can understand keeping the crew of a ship at sea quiet; but you are going to get the aircrew of a P-3 to stay silent?

      And while I can understand testing at all times; would you conduct a qualification test at 8:30pm?

  2. Rand, were this to have happened according to the whistleblower’s account, “We just downed an Airbus” was a figure-of-speech, meaning, we goofed big-time by shooting a civilian airliner like what happened in the Vincennes incident.

    I am skeptical of the whistleblower. I can believe the US Navy going into coverup mode, but the NTSB, too?

  3. I think it is highly improbable that people in the US Navy would be so stupid as to launch missiles right next to what is probably busiest section of air traffic on planet Earth.

    Then I think: “The stuff people have complained to me about when I’ve worked in customer service… Launching missiles into the path of a bunch of civilian airplanes is a lot more likely than anyone wants to think about.”

    1. One of the plausible aspects is that TWA 800 flight plan was delayed an hour. When the military does these exercises, they have exclusion zones that are documented in flight planning maps. However, these zones are not always active exclusions, and this allows non-military pilots to traverse them. If you are VFR, you have to ask for clearance just prior to entry. IFR, your clearance would have been provided earlier when you activated the flight plan. It is possible, with our poorer integrated systems at the time, that the clearance given an hour later didn’t check if the exclusion zone was still available. However, the NTSB would have picked that up when reviewing the flight plan. It would have been quite noticeable in an investigation.

      I should note, like Rand, I found the official story of TWA 800 off, and I’ve seen videos of what looks like a missile inflight in the area. I can believe an inadvertent missile strike, but it gets harder to believe a fleet exercise and qualification test in late evening without more witnesses. A twilight missile launch is an exciting event, and people in the area but not directly involved would want to watch, especially if it is planned so you’ll know when it happens. Some of these Navy crews would have been in the recovery operations immediately afterward. I find it hard to believe they would remain quiet. Sure, you follow orders, but lawful orders. Hiding a shoot down of a civilian airliner is not lawful.

      1. It does seem to imply that the rot was in place in the Navy long before most of us would have been aware of it. These days it’s a good deal more plausible than it might have been in 1996.

      2. “A twilight missile launch is an exciting event, and people in the area but not directly involved would want to watch, especially if it is planned so you’ll know when it happens.”

        That’s assuming the Navy always knows in advance itself. Impossible as it may sound, I know there has probably been at least one inadvertent Navy missile launch that was widely observed. It drew a lot of internet commentary, and the overwhelming opinion was that what looked like a missile smoke trail was in fact an airliner contrail lit oddly by the setting sun. The Navy denied having a launch that day.

        A friend of mine from the Pentagon and I were chatting one day, and I brought up the phenomenon. He gave a wan smile, shook his head, and said that it was an inadvertent launch. The Navy was going to withhold that information until after an upcoming election, then quietly release the information.

        If you’re now thinking “Well I’ve never heard that the Navy announced any such thing!” I can only say: “You’re right, you never have.”

  4. The missile hypothesis is bullshit, like just about all conspiracy theories. Doing missile testing in the middle of a very congested air corridor when the DoD has dozens of test ranges for that express purpose? Bullshit. Accidentally loading a live missile? Bullshit. No TFRs or other published flight restrictions? Bullshit. I could go on and on. Not to mention the NTSB testing that provided strong empirical evidence for the fuel vapor theory.

    It’s part of the human mind to try to find patterns and connections in observed events. This is what causes us to reject coincidences, despite mountains of evidence and mathematical modeling showing that coincidences should be and in fact are common. And we naturally feel that tragic events can’t be random; there must be more to it. These are almost certainly evolved behaviors that provided a selection advantage over the last half a million years or more. But these and other evolved behaviors provide lousy insight into near-random catastrophic events, as this was. In the human past, an itchy trigger finger (itchy thigh bone club hand?), “doing unto others before they do unto you”, “bad things happen because of bad people”, etc., could be adaptive. But that’s exactly the mental module that conspiracy theories tap into, and unless we exert our will and learned good judgement, we will get metaphorically or even physically eaten alive by the hell of conspiracy belief.

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