Going After Boeing
Washington Weekly – November 15, 1999
By EDWARD ZEHR
The Seattle Times recently took the Boeing company to task for engaging
in "a quiet pursuit of far-fetched theories" regarding the crash of TWA
Flight 800 in 1996. It seems that the company incurred the stern disapproval
of the newspaper which noted that "Boeing has actually refused to rule
out a bomb or missile in the July 1996 TWA crash." How gauche of Boeing
not to snap to attention, click heels and salute smartly when the government
barks an order. Once more our vaunted "free" press show themselves to be
the government's obedient, fawning bootlickers. (With a few honorable exceptions,
such as the Riverside Press-Enterprise, which reported on the glaring discrepancies
in the government's account of the crash early on).
With all possible due deference to the editorial writers at the Seattle
Times, who seem to have bestowed themselves honorary qualifications as
aerospace experts almost as freely as Oxford cloaked its errant, one-time
scholar, Bill Clinton, with an honorary doctorate as a consolation
prize for the one he failed to earn as a student there, what actual
qualifications do they have to utter definitive opinions on so technical
a subject? Do they really imagine that they are better qualified than Boeing's
engineers to understand the subject matter? Ah, but Boeing has a vested
interest in avoiding possible liability for the crash -- they are being
sued by family members of some of the crash victims. I might add that an
inveterate, kneejerk-liberal rag such as the Seattle Times also has a vested
interest in covering up possible malfeasance by Clinton administration
officials who have played fast and loose with the crash investigation from
the very outset.
According to the November 8 Progressive Review, Boeing is presently
"conducting chemical metallurgical tests, [and] reviewing FBI interviews
with witnesses, many of whom saw something apparently streaking towards
the plane before the crash."
Yes, it would be nice to know why more than a hundred eyewitnesses
saw something streaking towards the plane just before the crash if, in
fact, nothing was streaking towards the plane -- you know, abstruse technical
considerations such as that.
Occasionally I get e-mail from people who wish to know why I sometimes
inject psychological considerations into my commentary. The answer is,
I do it because our present political dementia cannot be fully explained
using logical considerations alone. I would cite, for example, the low
comedy of hardcore administration supporters on Usenet (sort of the low-rent
district of Internet) trying desperately to make sense of the fantasy leaked
by government "investigators" to their pals in the mainstream media. The
hallucination in question had to do with an "explanation" of the light
seen streaking up toward the aircraft as streams of fuel from the plane's
ruptured tanks which were somehow ignited and burned from the bottom up,
appearing to those on the ground as the glow of a missile streaking up
towards the plane.
Now, anyone who would believe so preposterous an "explanation" as that
must have flunked high school physics. (Who takes physics in high school
any more? It's far too difficult for the little sweethearts -- that's why
our engineering and physical science graduate schools are chock-a-block
with foreign students these days). Not that there is anything particularly
technical about this issue. Even an individual so technically dim as a
mainstream anchor person should be able to understand it, although none
of them seemed to get it. Anyone with so much as half a brain and a smidgen
of common sense ought to be able to figure out that fuel ejected into the
atmosphere from a ruptured tank at hundreds of miles per hour is going
to atomize and vaporize, not fall towards earth in neat little stream while
trailing along behind the aircraft at full speed like a faithful little
puppy dog. How did the Times characterize Boeing's investigation -- "a
quiet pursuit of far-fetched theories"? I wonder if their editorial writers
are familiar with the Arab expression, "to strain at a gnat and swallow
a camel"?
As a one-time aerospace engineer with 35 years of experience, I guess
the thing that bothers me most about TWA-800 is the number of aerospace
professionals who simply do not believe the government's version of the
mishap. Unfortunately, the writers at the Seattle Times seem to lack the
intellectual honesty and personal integrity to acknowledge this, although
they are certainly in a position to know about it. Instead of seeking the
truth, they set about disinforming the public using snide innuendo, unsupported
by verifiable facts, shrill name-calling (e.g. "paranoid conspiracy theorists")
and very little else. All of this is done in pursuit of a smelly little
hidden agenda which these "journalists" are too dishonest to acknowledge.
I wonder if they really understand how ugly a picture they are painting
of themselves?
I have talked to airline captains who regard the government's version
of the TWA-800 mishap as utter nonsense. One of these pilots told of the
many takeoffs he had made from Saudi Arabia under temperature conditions
far more stringent than those experienced by the TWA aircraft at JFK on
the evening of the crash. This pilot reckoned that if the Boeing 747 did
indeed have a design flaw such as the one postulated by government investigators
he would have died a hundred deaths. Be that as it may, there is only one
recorded instance of a heavy Boeing commercial aircraft having a fuel tank
explosion in flight and that one was using highly volatile military aviation
fuel. Thus, on a purely statistical basis, the probability of the government's
explanation of the mishap being correct is vanishingly remote. And yet
the technological dumbbells at the Seattle Times have the temerity to demand
that we all bow low to the government's dubious decree. That is what one
expects of people who are guided by illogical motives of which they seem
blissfully unconscious.
In a recent interview, former Navy Commander Bill Donaldson, who has
investigated the TWA-800 crash for two years on behalf of the Associated
Retired Aviation Professionals, noted that 26 other transport aircraft
worldwide have been shot down "by a man-portable anti-aircraft missile."
Thus there is nothing the least bit unique in the concept that the TWA
flight was intercepted by such a missile. It was well within range of some
of the more advanced shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons, and the eyewitness
sightings are consistent with such a
missile being fired at the aircraft. A Lufthansa cargo jet was fired
at with such a weapon in September, near Karachi airport in Pakistan.
But gosh, that doesn't jibe with the official version of events. Doesn't
that mean that Donaldson must be a "paranoid conspiracy theorist"? Bill
Donaldson is a retired Navy pilot with "more than 24 years of experience
in virtually all phases of naval aviation." Among his other qualifications,
Donaldson lists "graduation from the Navy's Postgraduate Aviation Safety
School in Monterey, California, where I completed the long course in aviation
safety and crash investigation. I have served as a safety officer and crash
investigator at both the Squadron and Air Wing levels, and was qualified
as a maintenance check pilot in six models of prop and jet aircraft. Also,
I am a qualified air traffic controller and served for two years as a Carrier
Controlled Approach Officer." I would be interested to know what the technical
qualifications of the editorial staff at the Seattle Times are to address
this subject with such implied omniscience. If, as I suspect, they have
none, I wonder whether they have ever bothered to get the opinions of people
with the technical expertise to speak knowledgeably on the subject. If
not, what qualifies them to hurl unsupported, puerile insults at people
who do have the technical expertise to address the subject? Is this something
they were instructed to do in the PC playbook? The problem with too
many "journalists" today is that they are mal-educated, indoctrinated,
opinionated far beyond their ability to comprehend and sorely lacking intellectual
integrity.
Commander Donaldson recently gave interviewer John F. McManus his own
version of the TWA-800 crash:
"I believe that a shoulder-launched
missile was fired from a small boat positioned less than three nautical
miles to the southeast of the aircraft. The missile punched through the
underside of the aircraft at a point where the left wing meets the fuselage.
Its warhead, a type that explodes immediately after impact, penetrated
approximately three additional feet into the six-foot-deep tank of fuel
in that wing.
The resulting explosion caused a massive
over-pressurization of all three left-wing tanks blowing open the top skin
of the wing. The explosion also impacted the empty center fuel tank, resulting
in a secondary fuel/air explosion under and in that center tank. All of
this led to catastrophic failures of the nose, tail, and left wing. The
plane's pieces, plus the passengers and crew, then plunged into the sea
in about 30 seconds."
Donaldson characterized the FBI's investigation as a "token effort,"
noting that his own investigation located 20 eyewitnesses the FBI had not
even interviewed. Donaldson claims that, "Some of these persons were critically
important eyewitnesses, people who were in boats and were first on the
scene and who claim to have seen other suspicious boats in the area."
The Commander also noted that the FBI had the Navy's China Lake [California]
Naval Air Weapons facility study recovered debris from the crash -- until
the Navy experts recommended that missiles be fired into 747 fuel tanks
in an effort to replicate the damage patterns observed in
the debris. At that point the FBI quickly terminated its investigation.
The CIA even got into the act with an animated cartoon purporting to
show what happened to the aircraft after "the fuel tank exploded." It was
laughed out of court by aviation professionals, and I shouldn't wonder.
The CIA version claimed that the aircraft climbed 3,000 feet after the
nose fell off.
Intrigued by the notion, I ran some numbers on it and even did a small
rudimentary flight simulation that indicated the aircraft might have ballooned
less than a thousand feet, using the most favorable assumptions. Yes, I
used to do aircraft simulations professionally back in the days before
Pontius was a pilot (as they used to say in the RAF). Those were the days
before you could buy one off the shelf at Toys-R-Us, which is to say sometime
before the Flood.
I am told that another engineer ran some numbers that indicate the
aircraft might have climbed a bit more than a thousand feet. (Simulating
the flight of aircraft that are disintegrating is not a very exact science).
I bent over backwards to make my assumptions conservative, which is what
any engineer would do. Nevertheless a lot of people assume that I cooked
the figures. Let them assume what they will, I can assure you that
there is no way anybody, using reasonable assumptions, could massage those
numbers enough to get that aircraft up by anything like 3,000
feet in its lugubrious condition. The CIA cartoon show was sheer fantasy.
I am also told that the altitude estimates were based on radar data
rather than flight dynamics considerations. If so, it is possible that
the data is spurious. This sort of thing is not unknown -- radar sometimes
shows things that aren't there. For example, the flight data recorder recovered
from the Egypt Air Flight 990 crash site does not confirm previously
described radar data. (An ominous report surfaced on Friday that fisherman
close to the site where the crash occurred heard two loud "booms" just
before the aircraft plunged into the sea. I'll get to that another time).
Commander Donaldson conducted his own tests on the Jet-A fuel used
by TWA-800. He maintains that you can't even light it with a match unless
it is heated to at least 127 deg F. In 1997 he extracted some fuel from
a 747 whose engines had been running for about the same length
of time as those of TWA-800 when the mishap occurred. The fuel's temperature
was only 68 deg F. Donaldson described what he did next:
"Then, I took the fuel home, poured
some into a pan sitting in my outdoor barbecue, and placed three lighted
fireplace matches into the pool of fuel. The matches went out! Yet this
is the fuel that, under the very same temperature conditions, supposedly
exploded because of some mysterious spark and brought the plane down. Impossible!
Even if you heat the fuel beyond 127 and stick a match in it, you'll get
fire but no explosion."
The point of the exercise is that commercial aviation fuel is designed
to burn in the engine, not in the tank. The government's explanation of
a "fuel tank explosion" is a real stretch. If there were even a remote
possibility of this happening there should have been a lot more such incidents
considering the number of 747 takeoffs there have been under far more
adverse conditions.
A telling point was made when James Sanders, who was criminally prosecuted
by the government for helping to expose the fraudulent nature of the mishap
investigation, was allowed to photograph the debris of TWA-800 in preparing
his defense. At Donaldson's request, Sanders "took close-up photos of the
area where the left side wing fuel tank meets the fuselage, and the underneath
part of the fuselage below the center fuel tank. It is here in this tank
that the government said the crippling explosion took place."
Guess what? One of Sanders' photos showed the bottom of the center
fuel tank to be "domed upward 14 inches." If the fuel tank had simply exploded
as the government maintains, "that metal surface should be domed downward,
the result of an explosion inside the tank," said Donaldson quite plausibly.
Which raises an exceedingly troubling question: has the government told
us the truth about what its investigators have found in the debris? Seen
in this light, the inane prattle of the Seattle Times editorial writers
pales into insignificance. Those guys really don't know anything -- they
talk just to hear their own words reverberate in the hollow round of their
skulls. |