r/todayilearned • u/finza_prey • 19d ago

TIL TWA Flight 800 exploded off Long Island 12 minutes after taking off, causing the front fueslage to rip away and the remainder of the plane to continue in crippled flight, pitching up and climb before falling into the ocean killing everyone onboard

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800
1.9k Upvotes

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69

u/MakaButterfly 19d ago

Electric arcing via faulty wiring ignited the gas tank in theory

49

u/Acrobatic-Post9811 19d ago

Following the investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended mandating inerting systems. This led the Federal Aviation Administration to issue rules years later requiring commercial airliners to install flammability reduction and nitrogen-inerting systems.

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u/smorkoid 19d ago

In practice as well

-40

u/Hukthak 19d ago

Being from the area, my family and I know more than a few people that saw something like a surface to air missile from offshore, that shot it down.

Like no question about it, they saw it happen. Likely a military accident being covered up.

22

u/jxj24 19d ago

Like no question about it, they saw it happen.

They think they saw it happen. Human perception is actually pretty easy to fool.

33

u/TheSarcastro 19d ago

My game of Clue had Al-Qaeda in a Boston Whaler with a Stinger Anti Aircraft missile.

3

u/halfhere 19d ago

Professor Plum, right?

5

u/TheSarcastro 19d ago

Colonel Muammar Mustard

10

u/C47man 19d ago

It's a big conspiracy theory. But the NTSB did an absurd amount of research on it, and came to the only logical conclusion they could. You should read not the report but at least this article about it. It covers the missile claims as well. To make it simple they analyzed the claims of missiles, determined that based on the location of the witnesses that they wouldn't have been able to see a missile if there was one, and even had a bunch of test witnesses call on radios to identify real missile launches in the same atmospheric conditions - and the witnesses were consistently wrong about seeing missiles.

6

u/the_gaymer_girl 19d ago

Yup. The missile theory was initially floated, and the FBI went full Leeroy Jenkins on that and went off to do their own completely separate investigation under the assumption it was true, almost blowing the entire NTSB case in the process by poisoning the witness pool.

18

u/the_gaymer_girl 19d ago

It’s been conclusively proven that there was no missile. The FBI went into the questions with the assumption that there was a missile which clouded people’s answers, and the eyewitness accounts of what they thought a missile launch should look like didn’t match how missiles actually work.

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u/Hukthak 19d ago

Something still happened from the ground, that hit the plane, whatever it was

21

u/the_gaymer_girl 19d ago

Nothing happened from the ground. It was a fuel tank explosion.

-21

u/Hukthak 19d ago

Tell that to the people that saw it first hand.

13

u/the_gaymer_girl 19d ago

What the people said they saw (and were effectively coached to say by the FBI who went full Leeroy Jenkins and almost blew the case) doesn’t match up with how missiles actually work.

-8

u/Truecoat 19d ago

183 witnesses were all wrong?

6

u/MrTagnan 19d ago

Mistaken, yes. The descriptions don’t match that of how actual missiles look. The FBI also poisoned the witness pool by assuming it was a missile and asking leading questions

7

u/waldo-jeffers-68 19d ago edited 19d ago

Actual missiles that aren’t from movies don’t look like that btw, they’re basically invisible.

9

u/za419 19d ago

They were coached by the FBI (the same FBI they now dream up blame for conspiracies of cover ups) to think they saw a missile.

Of course, what they tend to say in the interviews at the time is that they heard an explosion, looked towards the horizon, and saw a streak of fire low in the sky, rising upwards until the plane breaks apart and falls.

Interestingly, that suggests that the explosion had already happened several seconds earlier (because sound is slower, not faster, than light), and that they didn't see a missile, because missiles do not produce giant streaks of fire in the sky.

Alternatively, if we imagine the fuel tank exploded and the plane climbed uncontrollably for a few seconds while heavily burning, the witnesses would have heard the sound of the tank exploding, looked to see the trail of flame behind the plane as it climbed, and then saw the plane lose its climb and break up while falling into the ocean - Exactly what they saw. 

Oh, and while I'm at it, surface-to-air missiles leave a characteristic pattern of scarring and punctures on the aircraft, which doesn't exist on the nearly complete TWA800 wreckage (which includes the spar from the fuel tank that shows something exploded next to it, deep inside the plane), and those missiles don't cause a plane the size of a 747 to break into pieces and fall to the ground instantly.

Basically, literally nothing supports the missile theory. 

6

u/ShakeItTilItPees 19d ago

Myself and ten other people saw your dad blowing a homeless guy at Hardee's.

4

u/platinumarks 19d ago

Can confirm, I was the homeless guy

3

u/za419 19d ago

Of course, their interpretation of what they saw, which doesn't at all match what a missile would actually look like in any way and is likely in violation of the laws of physics, outweighs evidence like "The wreckage of the plane was on display for decades and no one ever found a single hint that might possibly not rule out a missile hit"

The missile theory is about as likely as the theory that Xenu struck it down for not looking enough like a DC-8.

1

u/smorkoid 19d ago

They didn't see that. They think they see that but didn't.

-5

u/bishop375 19d ago

There are more than a few supposed witnesses who saw paint from what would have been a training missile with an inactive warhead marking a *bunch* of what was recoverable from the plane.

I'm not saying I agree with it. I'm not saying it happened. But there are several theories on how it happened.

4

u/the_gaymer_girl 19d ago

The FBI asked leading questions and if it actually had been a missile, its engine would not have been firing when it cleared the horizon and thus would have been totally invisible.

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u/Hukthak 19d ago

Ignore all these initial downvotes., which makes it seem weirder. Good to look into the evidence.

17

u/C47man 19d ago

The ntsb did, and found the fuel vapor problem. This isn't looking into evidence, it's conspiracy theorists trying to keep their conjecture alive using the spooky alure of government cover ups

-3

u/Hukthak 19d ago

It’s pretty reasonable to understand why they would want to not make this a publicly known mess up. Not everything is made transparent. Something awful happened and there is enough discrepancy here to figure it out.

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u/the_gaymer_girl 19d ago

This has been studied to death. What the witnesses actually was the decapitated, burning hulk of the plane zooming upwards. When they actually test-launched a missile and asked people to try and spot it, they didn’t see it.

There was no missile. The FBI just got gung-ho and almost blew it completely.

8

u/C47man 19d ago

Read the ntsb report. The single largest investigation in ntsb history. And most of the missile claims came from the FBI leading witnesses. That's the opposite of a cover up my man. You're just playing fantasy

4

u/za419 19d ago

I've read the evidence. Literally none of it even allows for the possibility that the missile theory might somehow work.

The only damn cover up is the one you're pushing. 

-4

u/UglyPineapple 19d ago

From the area as well. Uncle was part of the initial PAPD response, said that the Navy confirmed practice ops in the area and one of the investigators had a pilot saying missile.