The agency has no evidence for any kind of target 'intercepting' the plane. | REUTERS NTSB: No Flight 800 missile strike

ASHBURN, Va. — Federal safety investigators still won’t say whether they’ll reopen their investigation into the explosion that took down TWA Flight 800 in July 1996. But they want reporters to get the message: It wasn’t a missile.

The agency has no radar evidence for any kind of target “intercepting” the plane before the fatal blast, the NTSB’s Joseph Kolly said during a Tuesday media briefing meant as refresher on a disaster that has inspired years of persistent conspiracy theories.


Witness testimony was not consistent with any kind of missile strike, he said. Neither were the patterns of burns and pitting among the passengers or seats. “Ultimately, we wound up ruling out a bomb or missile strike,” Kolly said.

Throughout the session, NTSB officials chided reporters for trying to ask about a controversial petition urging the agency to reconsider its investigation into the tragedy, which killed 230 people on a New York-to-Paris flight. The case has been getting newfound media attention driven by a documentary coming out this month that alleges a cover-up.

The NTSB says it’s still reviewing the petition, which was filed by a retired NTSB investigator and a physicist who were involved in the documentary. To meet the test for revisiting the investigation, the petitioners would have to show they have information that was unavailable during the original investigation or evidence that the board reached an erroneous conclusion.

Until then, NTSB spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said, it would be “very inappropriate” for the bureau to comment specifically on the petition.

“In all sincerity, I am upset about bringing this back up for the sake of people who lost folks in the accident,” said Kolly, director of the NTSB’s Office of Research and Engineering who was the fire and explosives investigator for the TWA 800 crash. “It’s just not a good thing.”

Still, the NTSB speakers took virtually every opportunity Tuesday to highlight portions of the agency’s final report that rebut allegations brought up by the petition.

They stressed the length and depth of the investigation, the agency’s most extensive to date. They ran through the news context of the time, showing how even in 1996, the agency and public were aware of terrorism as a potential cause. They held up metal plates showing typical bomb and missile damage, which they said were not reflected in the wreckage. They herded reporters out to a full-scale mock-up of the plane’s fuselage, its body charred and ripped, yet recognizable enough to twist the gut.

The tension is this: The NTSB found that the probable cause of the accident was a fuel tank explosion sparked by faulty wiring. But the petitioners insist the cause was something more nefarious, such as a bomb or shoulder-launched missile.

Kolly said the agency’s four-year investigation ruled that out.

“We did conduct an analysis of a [surface-to-air] missile intercept for both a direct intercept and proximity intercept. And we concluded that it was extremely unlikely that the position and the timing were favorable for that type of intercept,” he said.

Another portion of the petition alleges that newly uncovered chemical trace evidence suggests explosives. Kolly acknowledged that NTSB investigators discovered chemical residue in three places, and “it’s not definitively clear why.”

He said that at the time, possible explanations were believed to include residue left over from bomb-sniffing canine training, which he said was less likely than accidental contamination.

“Probably a more likely scenario is the fact that [the wreckage] was contaminated after retrieval from the ocean,” Kolly said. FBI and military personnel involved with the investigation could easily have left traces of explosives from their shoes or hands, or residue could have rubbed off from active duty military vessels transporting the material.

Robert Swaim, NTSB’s systems group chairman for TWA 800, complained that those who take a contrary view of the explosion have “misused” some of his comments related to the agency’s inability to find a definitive root cause.

“In the board meeting, I said, ‘Mr. Chairman, I wish I could come in with the exact wire’” that sparked the explosion, Swaim said. But he noted that the investigation pinpointed four or five fault indicators all pointing to one wire, related to fuel levels.

“We got it down to a few feet of wire bundle,” he said. “We had four or five, I think it was five, different electrical indications that came right back to that same short, couple few feet of wiring harness. But to have that specific short-circuit in the wiring, no we didn’t have it.”

Kolly also dismissed suggestions from the documentary that any evidence was misplaced or lost, answering a flat “no” when a reporter asked.

He acknowledged, though, that tension existed between the NTSB and FBI, which was conducting a separate investigation into whether there were any criminal activities related to the crash.

“There was a parallel investigation and there was friction, OK, and we recognize that,” Kolly said. “But it didn’t ultimately harm the investigation,” and since that time the two agencies’ relationship has improved.

Kolly said that on the NTSB’s end, the frustration was that the FBI was pursuing a certain set of information and sometimes asked leading questions.

“They were conducting criminal-type interviews,” he said. He pointed to a portion of the report that recounted some of the typical questions the FBI used, which he said included “How long did the missile fly?” and “What does the terrain around the launch site look like?”

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