From looking at the posts I'm not sure many have done much reading on this on the available websites. Stalcup pretty much proved Flight 800 was shot down by examining the radar tapes which showed an asymmetrical debris pattern shoot out the starboard side of TWA 800 at mach 4.
He said he proved it; he hasn't shown his work anywhere that I can find. If you can find it then please post a link. If you haven't seen it then you shouldn't be saying he proved it.
One thing Stalcup didn't do is calculate how big of a warhead would be required to eject debris at Mach 4. Explosive ejecta traveling through an atmosphere is subject to variety of sensitive scaling laws, i.e. double the mass of the warhead and you get a 10~15% increase in distance.
A fuel explosion is a soft explosion. It occurs at 300 feet per second. It would be impossible for a center tank explosion to eject materials at mach 4.
We have a conundrum. But the implication of the Mach 4 claim is that it must have been a missile has its own problems. Here is how Stalcup arrived at it. He used the distance debris was seen (0.5 nautical miles) between the loss of the transponder and the second radar sweep (8.5 seconds). A 1 kg part of an aircraft could get ejected at Mach 4 but it would only travel a short distance in 8.5 seconds due to it being more dependent on drag. If you make it 10 times heavier so drag has less effect on it then it would need 10 times the impulse, which means roughly 1000 times the explosive mass.
And the only way for a missile to eject debris at Mach 4 is the warhead to be touching the part that got ejected and on the opposite side from the direction it got ejected, which means the missile would have to have detonated inside the 747.
The ejection plume pattern caught on radar was in the continuing direction of the missile seen streaking towards Flight 800 by hundreds of witnesses.
Depends which eyewitness you use to determine which direction the streak of light was heading. The eyewitnesses were all over the map.
A fuel tank would explode symmetrically.
An exploding tank would fail at its weakest point which by definition means asymmetrically.
Mike Wire was a union ironworker working on a highway bridge 20 miles from Flight 800. He said when the shockwave from Flight 800's explosion hit his bridge it shook violently.
In his FBI interviews he said it "shook". Did he elaborate on it later? He was 10 to 11 miles from TWA 800, not 20. He is witness 571. His interviews can be found here:
http://twa800.com/witnesscd/AppendixG.pdf starting on pdf page 130. His statements are consistent with seeing TWA 800
after it first exploded as evidenced by the radar data and when he heard the first explosion.
Some smart researchers saw Wire's statement and realized a 300 foot per second fuel explosion wasn't strong enough to shake a bridge at 20 miles. 2000 foot per second missile warhead ordnance would shake a bridge 20 miles away however.
What was 2000 f/s? The detonation velocity, the shock front velocity? Either way, 2000 f/s is way too low.
The destructive power of a warhead is also dependent on its mass, not just on detonation or shock front velocity. If you want to double the effects radius you need 8 times as much explosives.
When Wire told FBI the rising light he saw rose from low on the horizon FBI said he changed his story later on in a second interview. When researchers spoke to Wire and told him this he said he never did any second interview.
The link above has two interviews with Wire. In each interview he was consistent about the origin of the streak.
We could take a 747 and explode its center fuel tank right in the same spot and Mike Wire's bridge wouldn't shake. Both these cases are simple forensic proof Flight 800 was shot down.
The explosion in the CWT was equivalent to 20 lbs of TNT. An SM-2 warhead weighs 137 lbs but only about a third of that is high explosives. If the SM-2 uses PETN then the warhead has the equivalent of 75.8 lbs of TNT. Following the inverse cube law of explosives then an SM-2 detonation would be about 56% louder at any given distance than the CWT explosion. So there isn't much difference. Besides, in the documentary Stalcup claims three missiles exploded near TWA 800. If that were true then Wire would have reported 3 equally sounds, not one loud then 3 or 4 quieter ones.
This is all academic anyway as there aren't thousands of high velocity penetrations in the aircraft that must be there if it was attacked by 3 anti-aircraft missiles.
