Ah a twa 747. Reminded me of that one poor twa 747 and all its passengers that sadly was unlucky enough to get shot down by the satanic demon government which then proceeded to meddle in the ntsb's and faa's investigation which independently concluded that the wiring was perfectly fine and then wouldn't allow a single witness who saw what actually happened to testify and then gaslit everyone into thinking it was a fuel tank implosion when there was explosion shrapnel pointing into the tank not outside. I love the government, they are so ethical and honest, they would never kill us for no reason and then not hold themselves accountable.....
I can’t tell if you intended to post sarcasm.
Or sad delusion.
I was flying the 747 at the time of TWA 800. I saw the fuel pumps, from our own jets that had failed thrust bearings, and were grinding impellers into the aluminum housings, plugging up the filters.
Hot packs. Long delay. Warmed up center tank pump full of vapor. Fire up the center tank pumps that are grinding internally, adding more heat and…yeah it was the government.
We’ve never been able to cover up something that big. The USS Vincennes proves that.
One thing I’ve learned from accident investigations - most eyewitnesses are hopelessly, hilariously, wrong about what they saw. They believe it, sure, but they didn’t see what they thought they saw.
They have no context, no experience in aviation. One of my favorites was an eyewitness to an F 14 crash who claimed “I saw the jet lose power.”
When in fact, the airplane stayed in full, afterburner the entire time.
Sure, the eyewitness believed what he told the mishap board, but it wasn’t true. It wasn’t even close to true. So the eyewitnesses in the case of TWA 800 believe they saw a missile streak up, which explained the explosion that happened later. But the nearest Navy ship was over 200 miles away. And the missile in use at the time simply doesn’t have that range.
In their own mind, they created something to explain what they saw, even though that thing had nothing to do with reality.
The sad part is, when they publish those sorts of statements, other people actually believe them.
People without an aviation background are unable to distinguish between testimony like that, that makes no sense, and actual events.
Conspiracy theorists pick up on these false statements, and weave a web of delusion, both for themselves and others.
TWA 800 was brought down by a center fuel tank explosion. Period.
It did force the rest of the 747 operators in the world, including us, to examine their center tank pump wiring, fuel quantity indicator system wiring, and the pumps themselves.
We operated with limited center tank pumps for quite a while, because suddenly the pumps were in very short supply. It turns out that the center tank pumps and the horizontal stabilizer transfer pumps are the same, so we robbed a bunch of pumps out of the horizontal stabilizers of our airplanes to put them in the center tank to keep the fleet flying, but it did cut down the range a bit by making the stabilizer tank unusable.
So, I flew the airplane, and I’m more familiar than most with USN capabilities, and I am here to tell you that TWA 800 was not a shoot down. It was a center tank explosion.
