What Brought Down TWA Flight 800?
It has now been 20 years since TWA Flight 800 exploded in mid-air just 12 minutes after taking off from New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport en route to Paris, and many are still questioning just what caused the crash that killed all 230 people on board.
The National Transportation Safety Board spent four years looking into the cause in what would become the lengthiest and most expensive investigation in the history of American aviation before publishing their findings in 2000, which stated the explosion was likely caused by a short circuit in the plane’s fuel tank.
That scenario seemed implausible however to many, including numerous eyewitnesses who saw the crash from on the ground in Long Island, and in his new book TWA 800: The Crash, the Cover-Up, and the Conspiracy author Jack Cashill takes a look at some of the alternate theories.
The most common is that some sort of missile or rocket hit the plane, and that there was a government cover-up to keep what really happened a secret.
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That strike to the outside of the plane may have come from a terrorist or even a US Navy ship according to conspiracy theorists, claims that were both declared untrue by the FBI a little over a year after the crash.
Flight 800 was a Boeing 747-131 that had completed over 16,000 flights and been in operation for 25 years when it departed on the evening of July 17 from New York City.
The plane exploded and crashed into the ocean just after 8:30pm as it made its ascent to 15,000 feet eight miles off the coast of East Moriches in the town of Brookhaven, located just west of the Hamptons.
Some who had seen the explosion and crash immediately took action to see if they could find any survivors, including an Air National Guard helicopter that was only miles away and even a few narby residents who were out on the ocean on boats.
The helicopter was eventually forced to turn away due to debris from the plane that was still falling from the sky, while those who approached the burning wreckage in boats said that the smoke was so bad it became impossible to breathe or get close to the scene.
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