Say What, Now? Part II

I do seem to be on a tear lately about conspiracy theories, don't I? Oh, well. As a friend of mine once put it, in an alleged job reference, "He has trouble with stupid people." Uh huh. I never did thank him properly for that but, not only did it torpedo that particular job, I suppose it was also a fair characterization. I really don't suffer fools gladly.

Which makes the fact that the world is so full of them something of a delicious irony, I suppose.

Anyway, the latest conspiracy theory to get under my skin - or, at least, reassert itself there - is the one concerning TWA 800. You remember that one, right? The 747 that blew up and crashed off Long Island in August of 1996.

Some people, it seems, just can't accept the fact that complicated machines sometimes break, that designs are never perfect and sometimes minor assumptions have fatal consequences that can take years to manifest themselves, and that Mr. Newton's laws, in our frame of reference, tend to be absolutes and quite unforgiving.

TWA 800, you see, didn't explode and crash because of a design flaw in the fuel tankage and electrical systems. Oh, no, that would be a far too prosaic reason to explain such a tragedy. I mean, no aircraft designer would ever run electrical wires through a fuel tank if it were dangerous, right? Just like no aircraft designer would ever dream of placing an air conditioning unit right next to a fuel tank, either. Such things just don't happen . . . except, that is, when they do.

So, why did TWA 800 crash? Simple. It was shot down by the U.S. Navy. Not intentionally, of course, unlike the cover-up that followed.

The theory is that the 747 was hit by a SAM fired by a U.S. Navy warship. Theorists point to a couple of things to support that claim. The first is the existence of explosives residue found on three seats recovered from the wreckage that were located close to the point where the aircraft broke up. Remember, the nose section of the 747 separated from the rest of the aircraft in the explosion that brought it down. Obviously, then, the fact that there was explosives residue on three of the seats is proof that there were explosives on the aircraft.

The second thing the theorists point to are the eyewitness accounts claiming that there was a "streak of fire" that rose from the ocean and climbed to impact the aircraft. There can be only one explanation for this: what those witnesses saw was a missile. Coupled with that, the theorist like to point to an ATC radar tape that shows a small, anamolous return, which again could only have been a missile.

Third, the conspiracy theorists claim that not only was it impossible for the centre fuel tank of the 747 to explode, as the NTSB determined, but that even if it did, the resulting damage would not have been enough to separate the nose of the aircraft from the rest of the plane. Again, only a missile could pack enough power in its warhead to do that.

Finally, the conspiracy theorists point to how quickly the Navy became involved in the search and recovery efforts. Not only did the Navy send in its "best" salvage vessel to take part, it immediately took control of the recovery effort away from the NYPD, who should have had jurisdiction over the "crime scene." That, of course, only would have happened if the Navy knew something, and was trying to cover it up.

Okay, it was no secret that the Navy was conducting exercises off the East Coast during the summer of 1996. The Navy, in fact, frequently conducts exercises off the East Coast. Unfortunately for the conspiracy theorists, however, the closest Navy surface ship to the flight path of TWA 800 was over two hundred miles away.

I say unfortunately because, according to the theory, a Navy SAM was responsible for shooting down the 747. The only problem being, the best Navy SAM at the time, the Standard SM-2, had a range of approximately ninety miles. Do the math.

Not only that, but there are SAMs, and then there are SAMs. Long-range weapons like the SM-2 are radar-guided, while short-range weapons are heat-seekers. Subtle difference, I know, but what that means is that they hit their targets in a different manner.

A heat-seeking weapon will look for a heat source to home in on. In other words, it won't attack the body of an aircraft, it will go after the engines, because those are the hottest parts of the plane. Which means that if a heat-seeking weapon had attacked TWA 800, the impact area would not have been on the fuselage but on a wing, where the engines were mounted. Since that was not the case with TWA 800, we can thus dispense with a heat-seeking SAM.

A radar-guided weapon, like the SM-2, will generally aim for the centre-mass of a target. The SM-2 was what is known as a SARH weapon, or a semi-active radar-homing missile. Translated into English, what that means is that the weapon is guided to its target by the weapons-director of its launching platform. The radar of the weapons director, you see, guides the weapon into the general vicinity of the target, which is called the "basket." Once the weapon is in the basket, its own radar takes over for final guidance to the target. The weapon will then attempt to hit the target where it gets the strongest radar return from; in other words, the fuselage.

Now, to be just a bit more technical, SAMs don't actually hit their targets. In either variety, heat-seeking or radar-guided, the weapons are proximity-fused. Again going back to simple English, what this means is that when the weapon senses that it is at the optimum distance from the target, it will explode. SAMs are designed to bring their targets down by shredding them with shrapnel, not by direct impact.

Furthermore, SAMs are unpowered weapons. By that I mean that, after the first thirty seconds of flight or so, the weapon's fuel supply is exhausted and it becomes a purely ballistic weapon traveling on momentum. It can still, of course, make flight corrections so long as it is in the air, but it is never going to travel any faster than it was at the moment the motor burned out. In fact, from that moment on, Mr. Newton's law of gravity takes over.

So, unless the launching platform was in extrememly close proximity to TWA 800, there is no way that the "eyewitnesses" saw a missile. Combined with the fact that the closest Navy surface ship was two hundred miles away - or, looked at the other way, TWA 800 was one hundred and ten miles beyond the maximum range of the Navy's best SAM - the missile part of this conspiracy theory is a physical impossibility.

Ah, but the conspiracy theorist have an answer for that one. The U.S. Navy submarine base at Groton, CT isn't that far away, and they claim that there were three submarines in the immediate vicinity that night: two attack submarines and a ballistic missile submarine.

But once again, those pesky facts come up to confound them. Going in reverse order, ballistic missile submarines aren't based at Groton. The nearest base for those submarines was at King's Bay, GA, so that's strike one. Strikes two and three consist of the fact that no U.S. Navy submarine, attack or otherwise, carry SAMs. Those are useless weapons for a submarine since, if the boat were able to launch them at an attacking aircraft, the aircraft would have already killed the submarine. Now, to be fair, the Navy had once talked about developing a SAM for submarines, but the programme was dropped when it was realized just how useless such a weapon was.

What about the radar tape, though? According to the theorists, it clearly shows a missile, right? Well, no. ATC radar doesn't work that way. It's not set up to get a "skin paint" off a target, which is what it would have to do if it were going to "see" a missile. Under normal circumstances, what ATC radar does is send out a signal that interrogates an aircraft's transponder. That transponder then sends a signal back telling the ATC radar the aircraft's ID, altitude and heading. If something doesn't have a transponder, or has its transponder turned off, there's no signal and the ATC radar can't "see" it. The only time ATC radar operates by obtaining a skin paint - by actively bouncing a signal off of a target and looking for the return - is when the primary computer-controlled system that interrogates the transponders crashes. While that does, unfortunately, happen often enough, that wasn't the case when TWA 800 went down.

Well, what about the explosives residue? How could that be anything other than proof that a weapon hit the aircraft? The problem with that one is that the FBI and the NTSB, during the investigation, came up with the documentation from the FAA that that particular 747 had been used in a training exercise for bomb-sniffing dogs. The point being that if you are going to train dogs to sniff out explosives, you'd better have some explosives for them to sniff. Otherwise, you're just wasting your time and the dogs', and giving them an opportunity to pee somewhere it really won't be appreciated.

Furthermore, there were only three seats that had explosives residue on them, and they weren't located at the point where the aircraft broke up. Now, if we go back to the contention that it was a U.S. Navy missile that brought the aircraft down, that's some pretty choosy residue. If, indeed, a missile had hit TWA 800, or there had been a bomb planted on the aircraft, there would have been explosives residue deposited over everything in the vicinity of where the weapon hit or the bomb went off. Residue would have been found on the fuselage, on all the other seats in the immediate area, on the floor, on the baggage in the forward baggage hold, on wiring runs, even on the bodies of the deceased. Yet we are left with the fact that out of all of those potential repositories of explosives residue, we are left with a mere three seats . . .

Ah, well. In the end, I suppose it really doesn't matter. The feeble-minded will never be able to come to grips with the fact that they aren't as smart as they think they are, and will continue to invent elaborate conspiracies to explain away the blindingly obvious. Well, at least what's obvious to everyone except themselves, that is. After all, Occam's Razor is for shaving, right?