Posted by Larry on September 08, 19100 at 20:20:55:
TWA Flight 800 -
Navy Drone Culpability?
From a confidential source
9-8-00
I read with interest your article about the orange painted wreckage allegedly found at the scene of the TWA Flight 800 tragedy.
If the wreckage in question was, in fact, remnants of a U.S. Navy drone, the odds are it was not a Teledyne Ryan Firebee. Although the Navy does use Firebees (as does the Air Force), they are expensive and, all other things being equal, their use is generally limited to those test/training scenarios in which high speed, high altitude targets, or high performance hostile aircraft simulations are needed. On July 17, 1996, Whiskey 105 was reportedly restricted to an altitude of only 6,000 feet. This does not fit well with the usually expected test/simulation envelope of the Firebee. For air to surface attack scenarios simulating cruise missiles and/or low flying fighter aircraft, the much cheaper BQM-74E at 540 knots, is reputed to fill the bill nicely.
The BQM-74E, according to Northop-Grumman, is used in more than 80 percent of the Navy's live-target air defense training and weapons testing. Like the Firebee, it too, is usually painted a reddish-orange. In appearance, it looks remarkably like a 12' long flying torpedo with stubby low-aspect wings about amidships, small negative dihedral elevators at the tail, and a single vertical stabilizer. The silhouetted aircraft depicted in Linda Kabot's photograph does not resemble a Firebee. Its profile does, however, resemble a BQM-74E. An even better match is the profile of the BQM-74E program successor, the Northrop Grumman Target-2000 drone, which has the same basic torpedo shaped fuselage, but with higher aspect (longer and skinnier) swept wings in an inverted gull-wing configuration. It could be this swept, inverted gull configuration that causes the aircraft in the Kabot photograph to have no visible left wing. The aircraft appears to be banked in a gentle left turn and in the case of the T-2000 configuration, its left wing would be pointing directly at the camera, end-on.
It is not known what the production status of the Target-2000 was in the summer of 1996. Though it is doubtful that it was yet in production. Nevertheless, the Navy may have had a few prototypes or preproduction examples for T&E and its presence over Long Island on 17 July 1996, cannot yet be ruled out All this having been said, the BQM-74E, as previously mentioned, is still the best bet if for no other reason than they are ubiquitous. At the beginning of the Gulf War, the Navy had more than 200 on hand.
There seems to be some speculation about the drone having been launched from Wallops Island, VA . This is possible, but not likely. The usual mission time for a BQM-74E is 45 minutes to an hour. Although it can stay aloft for 70 to 75 minutes, depending on power setting (speed) and altitude, if it were ground launched from Wallop's it would have used the lion's share of its time aloft just getting to the range. A more likely scenario would be for it to have been air launched at or near the exercise area by a DC-130, a specially configured Navy (not Air National Guard) C-130 used for drone launching and command & control (C2) . This aircraft would almost certainly have remained in the area after launch for C2 purposes until the drone was shot down, crashed, or parachuted into the sea for recovery by helo or specially rigged surface craft. A6Es also have the capability of air launching these drones.
If a drone was, in fact, being used in connection with live fire tests that evening, the presence of the P-3 Orion in the area makes sense. A P-3 would be required to arrive on scene at least two hours before game time, surveil and clear the range area, and to serve as a monitoring platform for the range safety officer who has abort authority over the drone and full authority to halt all test/training operations should unsafe conditions develop. Certain specially modified P-3s, designated as NP-3D's, are also used if the mission requires sophisticated data and telemetry monitoring, recording, over-the horizon data relay services and satellite links. The presence of one of these flying laboratories off Long Island on the evening of July 17th 1996, together with a target drone, if established, would be prima facie (though certainly not conclusive) evidence that a live-fire missile test against a drone was planned. The NP-3D has, inter alia, the ability to receive and record the missile's flight data telemetry which is absolutely essential for flight and systems test evaluation. If the "P-3" reported at the scene that night was, in fact, a NP-3D, it would almost certainly have been from NAS Patuxant River or perhaps NAS Norfolk, rather than from NAS Brunswick as reported in the press.
Could a collision with a Navy target drone have brought down TWA Flight 800? Could there have been some monstrous blunder in which live fire was enroute as the drone, flying way-point patterns autonomously, coincidentally approached Flight 800? Was there an IFF failure? A fumbled over-the-horizon hand-off? The truth may not emerge soon, but in time, and with enough people chipping away their truth tools, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), it will.
I have fought for a long time coming to the conclusion that the Navy brought down TWA Flight 800, and even as I write, I'm not quite there yet. But in the words of Forest Gump, "Things happen." The recovery of contemporaneous drone wreckage at or near Flight 800's debris fields would certainly attest to that.
NOTE: The foregoing contains no classified information. All material contained herein is available through open sources, (too) much of it published by the Navy itself on the Internet - to my dismay and chagrin.