A pilot who flew Obama questions the TWA 800 story

You can find more on this incident here.

One of the reasons this new story struck us was because quite a few years ago, a pilot who had flown TWA 800 not long before it went down, told us that he and his colleagues didn't believe the official story.

Andrew Danziger, NY Daily News - There are many reasons to disbelieve the official explanation of what happened to TWA 800 almost 19 years ago, on July 17, 1996, off the South Shore of Long Island. There’s hardly an airline pilot among the hundreds I know who buys the official explanation — that it was a fuel-tank explosion — offered by the National Transportation Safety Board some four years later....

After the explosion, more than three dozen witnesses reported they’d seen contrails going up into the sky towards the plane; 18 of those people said they saw something coming up from the water, rising to meet the plane...

The FBI only summarized the interviews in its reports; the witnesses weren’t permitted to see what was written or to review the reports, and the NTSB only received summary reports in which all personal information was redacted. And maybe most importantly, the witnesses — there were more than 700 of them — weren’t permitted to testify...

Among those witnesses were people who attended a wedding on a beach in the Moriches, which was in progress at the time of the explosion. Some of them were recording the ceremony, their cameras trained on the wedding party with the ocean and sky in the background. Many of these people witnessed the explosion, and some said they saw something rising from the water.

During the investigation, holes were discovered in parts of the aircraft skin that penetrated from outside in — evidence that an object, most likely a missile — had struck the plane. But when investigators began photographing that evidence, according to my former colleague who was there, the FBI told them to stop.

Normally, air crash investigations in the United States are led by the National Transportation Safety Board. It is standard procedure to have investigators present who represent all of the interested parties: the NTSB and Federal Aviation Administration, the airline, the pilots union, the mechanics and the manufacturer of the airframe, engines and aircraft components.

The FBI’s presence on the investigation team was unusual in any fashion, but for the agency to take the lead was unprecedented....

Was it a terrorist attack — a precursor to 9/11, as has been widely suggested — or a U.S. military training exercise gone wrong?

Sadly, we might never know. But as an experienced commercial pilot, I know this much: Planes do not blow up by themselves. I firmly believe that this plane was shot down. I also believe my friend when he says the FBI imposed limits on what investigators could and couldn’t analyze.

Andrew Danziger is a 28-year airline veteran, with experience in turboprops and Boeing aircraft. He was an international 757/767 captain for the last 14 years. He has served as an airline ground school instructor and check pilot in both simulators and aircraft and was one of the pilots to fly Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign.