[woodruffw]

I feel terribly for these families, but the evidence presented in this filing is circumstantial at best: it adds nothing to contradict the overwhelming evidence (including the recovered fuselage) that nothing collided with the aircraft.

It’s easy to see ghosts everywhere, and sometimes they really are there. But TWA 800 probably isn’t one of those cases.

[csharpminor]

They’re not just claiming circumstantial evidence. The plaintiff says they have FOIA documents describing confiscated Navy radar tapes that show an object striking TWA 800.

Damning if true, but a lot hinges on documents we haven’t seen.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

A radar that was under test. Could it be clutter or ghost track? Was it detected independently by other systems?

[woodruffw]

That would indeed be damning if true! I suppose we’ll see if and when those are made public.

[dontknowwhyihn]

It seems pretty damming that the evidence was withheld in the first place.

[woodruffw]

Not really. The NTSB (or FBI, or CIA) is not compelled to release any particular piece of material, especially not if all already public material sufficiently explains what happens.

I don’t particularly trust the FBI or CIA, but that alone is not good enough, nor is circumstantial evidence that is adequately accounted for.

[onionisafruit]

Those documents would be circumstantial evidence because they only show that the author claimed that there were radar tapes showing something hit TWA 800.

If the radar tapes still exist and can be presented as evidence, that would still be circumstantial evidence because they only show what the radar measured. The meaning of those measurements require interpretation to come to a conclusion that a missile hit TWA 800.

I’m not saying this would not be strong evidence, just that it would be circumstantial evidence and not direct evidence.

[mike_d]

They are represented by a top tier litigation firm, not some random lawyer trying to make a name for himself. I'm sure they have expert witnesses lined up.

[onionisafruit]

I’m sure they do. I wasn’t trying to imply they don’t have good evidence. I was only taking issue with the description that it isn’t circumstantial and secondarily the misconception people have that circumstantial evidence is weak evidence.

The only direct evidence in this case is eye witness testimony, and the government has done a pretty good job of undermining that with their typical “your lying eyes” argument. So this will be a battle of circumstantial evidence.

[bitexploder]

Expert witnesses always agree with whomever hired them. Just a point to consider.

[naniwaduni]

The real filter is, of course, on being able to hire credible expert witnesses who agree with you.

[tzs]

That's not hard.

I once saw a professor emeritus from a major CS/EE university who had founded their CS program and semiconductor program, had a bazillion highly ranked papers in those fields, a ton of patents including several that laid the foundations for modern integrated circuits, was an IEEE Fellow, a National Academy of Engineering member, and more I don't remember, testifying that the term RAM as commonly used in CS and EE includes hard disks, CD-ROM, and floppies.

I was doing some work for the opposing side and asked their lawyers how that expert could possibly say that. Surely if his friends or colleagues found out it would tarnish his reputation I though.

What they told me was that STEM communities, both academic and industrial, are well aware of how expert witness gigs work. Lawyers tell you what they need to do, and you find some argument for their position that isn't definitely a lie (in this case RAM stands for "Random Access Memory", and hard disk, CD-ROM, and floppy are indeed memory and have random access so of course are RAM), write up a report stating that, show up at the trial, have your impressive credentials read, and spend maybe an hour being examined and cross examined. In exchange for this you get enough money for a big fancy RV or a nice boat.

So when his colleagues learn that he said it is normal in CS to include floppies and disks and CD-ROM when talking about a computer's RAM they don't think he'd gone nuts or senile. They just think he must have wanted an RV or boat or to remodel his house and took an expert witness gig.

Our expert, who had a similar list of credentials, was using the gig to pay for a $100k car.

[thaumasiotes]

That is a purely monetary filter. The court is not able to determine which experts are credible and which aren't.

[dontknowwhyihn]

It would directly contradict the claim that a fire caused the crash

[Gamecollector]

> If the radar tapes still exist

Read the lawsuit, they have the tapes.

[StanislavPetrov]

As someone who lived on Long Island at the time, I can tell you that there were dozens, if not hundreds, of eye witnesses from both the beach and the water that claimed to have seen a missile fly up and hit the plane. There was explosive residue consistent with a missile found on on the wreckage of the plane. One of the lead investigators thought it was a missile, and he was shuffled out of the investigation.

[jliptzin]

Don’t know why you are being downvoted, I am also from Long Island and remember the same accounts at the time

[woodruffw]

Because it’s exactly the kind of circumstantial, already-mediated evidence we’re talking about: can you, as a civilian, reliably distinguish a missile arc from a burning fuselage at dusk from miles away? I know I can’t.

[cool_dude85]

The one's going up and the other's coming down.

[woodruffw]

If you read the NTSB’s report, you’ll note that they address this explicitly: the front half of the plane more or less sheared off, causing the back half to pitch up before descending.

[StanislavPetrov]

That was the "CIA analysis" that was published on the front page of Newsday after the crash that had absolutely nothing to do with the hundreds of eye-witness accounts. Hundreds of people saw a missile fly thousands of feet up from sea level to the plane, which subsequently exploded. Nothing these people saw had anything to do with what happened to the plane after it broke up, which is what the CIA/sanitized-NTSB report addressed. Their further absurd claim that the explosive residue found on the wreckage from the plane was tracked in on the bottom of some passenger's shoe was similarly insulting to the intelligence of everyone who was following the investigation. Combined with the purging of several lead investigators - decades-long veterans of many crash investigations - who insisted that the plane was shot down by a missile, everything points to a missile attack and a coverup.

[jrs235]

If you think you know you can't you're probably right. I would think and give credibility to the idea that people can distinguish between something moving up/away from the horizon into the sky and vice versa.

[woodruffw]

Please see the adjacent response: part of the fuselage almost certainly ascended before its final descent. That’s the part that I am not confident I would be able to distinguish.

[rdtsc]

> overwhelming evidence (including the recovered fuselage) that nothing collided with the aircraft.

Anti-aircraft missiles don’t necessarily collide with the target. They can spray sharpnel/fragments at the target. Only a few of those in the fuel tank or engine would be necessarily. So unless they recovered all the fuselage parts, it might be hard to discount the missile as the cause.

Wonder if anyone who confiscated those tapes from the Navy would be willing to come forward after these years and explain why they did it that.

[woodruffw]

I believe over 95% of the airframe has been recovered at this point, with no evidence of an external explosion or collision. I suppose the evidence could be solely present on the 5% that wasn’t recovered, but that requires a significant speculative leap.

[sudosysgen]

The SM-2 has direct-hit capability. If it did directly hit the fuselage without the NTSB being briefed on its capabilities, it could easily be mistaken.

[sumofproducts]

You're thinking of SM-3, not SM-2, and SM-3's minimum altitude is somewhere in the rarefied upper atmosphere when it burns out and can separate the kill vehicle. Not even the abortive SM-2 Block IV was hit-to-kill.

That said, all SAMs without nose proxy fuzing are /theoretically/ capable of directly impacting their targets. Only a scant handful of ABM-specialized interceptors are designed to do so in order to ensure either complete warhead destruction OR a miss that doesn't produce a boatload of shredded debris clutter.

A direct hit would shred a huge amount of of the airplane, the expanding cloud of non-warhead missile bits would blow a hole through the other side, and the entire thing would be LITTERED with shrapnel.

A marginal intercept is unlikely; you'd need the missile itself to fail in some way; airliners are, unfortunately, effortless targets. Even then, it would have to miss by an absolutely humongous distance (probably larger than a proxy fuze could measure, so command-detonated by the launching system) to golden BB one single piece of shrapnel into a vital airplane bit.

There are a nigh-infinite number of ways anti-air engagements can go, but virtually none of them result in splashing the target without poking a telltale quantity/distribution/shape of holes in it.

[sudosysgen]

I'm not. The SM-2 has contact fuze capability in some models. Look it up. This was almost under active development at the time, as the SM-2 Block IV.

I'm not talking about therotically here. The SM-2 was at the time in a development program that involved direct hits.

A test warhead for direct hit capability is something that was tested for the SM-2 repeatedly, and was almost certainly being tested around the time this incident happened.

You would not expect any fragmentation in such test. Since hit to kill capability was under development at the time, and since test missiles often have dummy warhead, you could reasonably expect exactly what I said.

[sumofproducts]

Ahh, I'm so used to thinking of SM-2 IV as stone tablet-tier ancient history that it didn't even occur to me that there was a time when it was under development!

If you're talking low TRL dev shots where you dgaf about putting the real boom in since you're just measuring miss distance (presuming you're referring to the IVA's new steering/seeker/dorsals before uhh... 97 or whenever they shipped it?), that makes a great deal more sense.

I am still extremely skeptical that one could punch a missile that huge and that speedy through an airliner without it being blindingly obvious, but it certainly wouldn't have any standard frag bits flying around.

[baryphonic]

Circumstantial evidence is still evidence, evidence by implication. Direct evidence is that which is directly asserted, like eyewitness statements, recordings, or recovered items.

Almost all of the evidence the NTSB accumulated for TWA 800 is circumstantial evidence, apart from things like the flight recorders, the eyewitness statements and physically recovering the aircraft. Even the proverbial phrase "smoking gun" would be circumstantial evidence of a murder, not direct proof.

The NTSB's circumstantial evidence is quite thorough, including literal experiments the Board performed. It's mostly quite strong, and it explains the nearly-irrefutable direct evidence (e.g. cockpit recordings, the state of the recovered instruments at the time of the accident).

Also, direct evidence can sometimes be the most unreliable. Eyewitness statements, for example, are notoriously flawed, as our memories are not perfect hard disk dumps, but are malleable. Even in this case, it's possible that the FBI & CIA or even the NTSB itself "poisoned" the direct testimony of the hundreds witnesses on shore, at sea or even in the air. (My own bias is that I have much more respect for NTSB investigators.)

The NTSB's report is nearly persuasive to me, other than the ignition source. Regardless, I do think the NTSB's recommendations & subsequent FAA action have made air travel safer as a result of their work (again, almost all of it circumstantial).

[Gamecollector]

> overwhelming evidence

Well yes, of course it would look overwhelming if all the contradictory evidence and testimony was buried. Not to mention any evidence they fabricated to support their cover-up.

You're really missing the main point of the lawsuit.

[woodruffw]

I’m not missing that. My point is that the actual evidence is pretty threadbare, and vaguely gesticulating about a conspiracy does not actually conjure stronger evidence.

Is it possible a missile really did blow up TWA 800? Sure. But I am not convinced by arguments that are effectively appeals to my latent distrust for the CIA, much less arguments that boil down to fill-in-the-dots conspiracy pattern matching.