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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those conspiracies that always seemed probably true, based on my cursory examination of the evidence.

Or the other way, assume a weapons test went horribly wrong; what would the result be?

Missile damage to aircraft leaves very distinct and VERY obvious traces as you would expect from a bunch of shrapnel suddenly slicing through the fuselage at hundreds of different points. If you want an example look at the reconstructed fuselage Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 which got shot down over Ukraine. 95% of the fuselage of TWA 800 was recovered. It was not hit by a surface to air a missile.

What if it was skin-to-skin impacted by an unarmed missile?

TWA 800 violently exploded in mid air. That would not be caused by an inert missile impact. The high speed impact of an inert body into an aircraft the size of a 747 is not a reasonable explanation for a violent in-flight breakup on top of the fact that there is literally zero evidence for it. The most likely explanation is exactly what is written in the official report.

Being struck violently by an unarmed missile could have caused a massive structural failure of the aircraft, which then exploded.

> literally zero evidence for it.

There is literally circumstantial evidence for it, as well as eye-witness testimony. This is not "proof" by any stretch, but it's certainly evidence.

My understanding is that the chronology of all eyewitness accounts for the missile have been after the airframe was known to have broken up, meaning that they were most likely seeing large sections of the burning fuselage. Are there other eyewitness accounts that don’t match that, or are you saying that the official chronology is itself suspect?

Eyewitness accounts are unreliable and may be completely mistaken. But nevertheless, they are evidence.

'Evidence' doesn't imply 'proof'.

The existence of evidence is not veridical in nature: that’s why we classify evidence as circumstantial, observed, etc.

In other words: if nothing has changed about the eyewitness accounts in the last 26 years, then there is no new reason to doubt the (overwhelmingly likely) explanation for them.

I responded to the claim "there is literally zero evidence for it" by pointing out that there is circumstantial evidence, and eyewitness accounts.

The problem is that this circumstantial evidence contradicts actual hard evidence on the wreckage.

Circumstantial evidence that seems to be contradicted by other evidence is still evidence. To claim that there is 'literally zero evidence' is literally wrong.

> My understanding is that the chronology of all eyewitness accounts for the missile have been after the airframe was known to have broken up

This statement is absurd on its face unless all the witnesses were simultaneously staring at the seconds ticking on a nuclear clock as they witnessed the plane explode. The whole thing would've transpired in less than a minute. There's no way they could pinpoint the timing of witnesses observations that accurately.

I’m not entirely sure how a loose wire in a fuel tank can cause an explosion but a loose missile in the same tank cannot.

95% of the wreckage was recovered and painstakingly reconstructed in a hangar, then kept for 25 years (and notably, used as a training aid for NTSB investigators during that time). Barring some sort of "huh, this looks like something went in rather than out", that's a fairly hard theory to push.

>That would not be caused by an inert missile impact

Why not? Inert missile punches through a fuel tank, aerosolizing the fuel, and either the missile engine or a damaged aircraft engine ignites it.

That would cause a fire, not a detonation. The same way gas tanks don't actually explode if you shoot them, they spring leaks and those leaks may catch fire but actual booms require very specific circumstances. Specifically, they require the correct mixture of air and fuel vapors but that doesn't require a missile impact to ignite. Something much more mundane like a spark is just as effective and about 5 orders of magnitude more likely to occur.

TWA 800 broke apart as a result of a major overpressure event. The particular mode of in-flight failure observed in TWA 800 is very difficult to cause by poking a single missile sized hole anywhere in the aircraft. Not theoretically impossible, but difficult to the point that it's not a reasonable explanation. You have to take the combined probability of 2 very unlikely events rather than just 1.

That's helpful, though comparing a (perhaps) 1900kg missile that's 53cm/21in in diameter with a ~1000°C exhaust temp to a bullet isn't quite right.

> a spark is just as effective and about 5 orders of magnitude more likely to occur.

Seems you know of data about commercial airline fuel tank spark explosions. I didn't find much about this problem online. When else did this seemingly under-reported catastrophic commercial airline event happen?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_Airlines_Flight_143

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_Airways_International_Fli...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_214

All fuel tank explosions. Modern aircraft have equipment specifically to mitigate fuel vapor in the tanks because of these sorts of incidents.

TWA 800 also caused improved maintenance requirements of wiring that might arc/spark, as inspections of other aircraft found widespread metal shavings, non-standard wiring, and eroded insulation in nearly every aircraft they took a look at.

>> The high speed impact of an inert body into an aircraft the size of a 747 is not a reasonable explanation for a violent in-flight breakup

Please explain this assertion. It makes no sense (at least to me).

It's exceptionally difficult to make a large airliner explode like a gas station in a 1980s action movie by hitting it with an inert missile-sized body. You could certainly cause damage which would cause it to eventually crash but TWA 800 violently exploded in mid air, which is different.

Thank you -- this is exactly the sort of unpacking of the idea that I was asking for.

Yeah, it could. A 747 is designed to withstand all sorts of failures, but impact by a missile is not one of them.

Loss of structural integrity could easily cause violent breakup by aerodynamic forces. A 747 is not going to stay together if the pointy end isn't into the wind. Then there's all that fuel suddenly released and atomized, and fuel absolutely loves to burn. Remember that fireball when the airliners hit the twin towers?

My dad flew F-80s in the Korean War. The F-80 had a nasty characteristic. If you flew it too fast, it would pitch up, and the sudden aerodynamic forces would rip the wings off. Unfortunately, the engine was more than powerful enough to do this in level flight, so the pilot had to be keenly aware of this at all times.

(The solution was swept wings, exemplified by its successor, the F-86.)

> Malaysia Airlines Flight 17

This is what seals it for me. Sadly, so much time has elapsed, and the world has turned to such shit, that we have multiple other incidents to compare to. Not just MH17, but also PS752, and many others that did not receive as much attention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...). TWA800 looks nothing like these.

Test missiles often have dummy or instrumented warheads. You would not expect it to look anything like.

And while normal warheads typically try to narrowly miss to maximize fragmentation, the SM-2 is quite unique in that it is specifically designed with a contact fuze as fragmentation doesn't work very well for many of its intended targets.

Occam’s razor, alas.

Only if it was frag warhead, it could have been a continuous-rod warhead.

>Missile damage to aircraft leaves very distinct and VERY obvious traces

And conveniently the CIA prevented the NTSB from doing their normal investigation, so I guess we'll never know what obvious traces may or may not have been.

That theory falls apart instantly. The NTSB housed the 95% reconstructed fuselage and used it for training for more than two decades.

And that explanation falls apart instantly when you consider the fact that the FBI was criticized by a neutral third party for removing some of the wreckage without any documentation.

The IAMAW wasn't a "neutral third party"; the union's members were the ones potentially responsible for the maintenance faults resulting in the alleged short-circuit in the fuel tank.

> Problems with the aircraft's wiring were found, including evidence of arcing in the fuel quantity indication system (FQIS) wiring that enters the tank. The FQIS on Flight 800 is known to have been malfunctioning; the captain remarked on "crazy" readings from the system about 2 minutes and 30 seconds before the aircraft exploded.

> The NTSB housed the 95% reconstructed fuselage

To anyone familiar with the CIA's behaviour over the past half a century or so, that says "the CIA discretely disposed of the 5% of the fuselage that did have obvious traces of missile damage". We don't know that that's actually true, but that's the level of trust the CIA has earned.

FBI and CIA could easily “unrecover“ parts of evidence with those marks.

(“The IAMAW strongly criticized the FBI's conduct during the investigation, including the undocumented removal by FBI agents of wreckage from the hangar where it was stored”, from the Wikipedia link above.)

A missile with a dummy warhead could easily bring it down without exploding. Just hit it where structural failure would result. What you'd want to look for is an appropriately sized hole, and residue from the missile's exhaust.

The reason for the warhead is to improve the odds of the bringing down the airplane.

The radar tapes show something impacting the plane and then "spiraling away", sounds like it could easily be a collision by a missile without a warhead.

> For example, Dr. Stalcup obtained several FBI records never released to the TWA 800 families or the public. One described an “original [Navy radar] tape” showing an object “heading straight for TWA 800.” Another describes an object on radar “impact[ing]” TWA 800 and “spiral[ling] away,” while also stating that witnesses described seeing a “flair (sic) going up. . . . , orbit/circle another object. Subsequently debris fell from the sky.”

No it could not unless it impacted at exactly the wrong place. Downing planes with missiles is hard: much of a plane can survive having a hole in it, while there are a few critical sections.

A AIM-9 crashed into a MIG, didn't go off, got stuck, and reverse engineered after landing.

An SM-2 and an AIM-9 have a two order of magnitude difference in kinetic energy. It's not even close. The SM-2 is 10x heavier and would impact such a target at relative velocity of Mach 2+, whereas a Sidewinder will often impact at only a few hundred kilometers an hour.

At the same time, a 747 and a MiG are two completely different vehicles.

An SM-2 has a solid chance of sinking a ship - and was seriously investigated for that application. A direct hit on a 747 is game over. It's going to go clean through, and if it's into the fuselage, cut it in two.

A 747 has plenty of wrong places that if hit would be curtains. It is not designed to resist battle damage. It is designed to resist failure of individual components.

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