Just wanted to make a few more points:
1. The center fuel tank issue isn't solely one associated with the 747. The P-3s that I flew on also have a center fuel tank that's rarely ever used except on flights over the Pacific. NATOPS safety requirements are that at least 1,000 pounds of fuel must be kept in the tank during any flight to ensure cooling of the lines running through it. That's been the case since I started flying back in 1979, and I would guess for as long as the plane has been in service.
2. As has been noted, most SAMs have a proximity sensor that is used to set off the warhead so they don't actually make contact with the aircraft. Some of the theories I have heard include the missile passing though the aircraft and not detonating, but caussing fumes in the center fuel tank to detonate, which again shows a misunderstanding of how these missiles work. A SAM is not a smart bomb that can track a laser to a particular spot on a target. Airplanes are a lot more manueverable than a building or a staionary tank, so they are designed to get close, several hundred feet or more, then detonate and put a shower of fragments into the flight path of the aircraft. Even the best radar-guided missile at the time could not be targeted to actually strike an aircraft.
Not the Stinger which has fusing for Penetration, Impact, or Self-destruct. How many of these were left in Afghanistan when we pulled our support from there?
3. As for Larry's "dummy" missile, I've never heard of a dummy SAM. We had dummy Harpoon and Bullpup missiles, but they couldn't fly and were only used for training people how to load them on the aircraft. I saw dummy Sea Sparrow SAMs on the USS Saratoga, but they were the same way... just empty shapes that could be used to practice loading procedures. To the best of my knowledge no Navy ships have fully-functional "dummy" missiles that just don't have a warhead.
4. I find it pretty incredible that of all the people who were out on the water at that hour, or just out gazing at the water at that time, that over 100 people happened to be looking at the exact right spot to see what would be a barely noticeable spot of light going up. When we accidentally launched a Trident II missile near Bermuda in the 1980s only a scant handful of people actually saw it go up and that was an island full of people with a close-up view of a huge rocket going up. Most of the witnesses were people who had heard about it but not actually seen it. So over 100 people, all looking at the exact right spot, to see a rocket motor on a SAM? I don't think so. I think there's just a lot of imagination going on there.
This wasn’t Bermuda; it was right off of Long Island, there were probably thousands of potential witnesses of which 200+ saw the event, nothing unusal about that. Read the descriptions of some and it would have been obvious as to why it was seen. And those that did see it were on land, on sea, and in the air and their accounts triangulated back to launch locations.
5. As for the alledged radar track of something flying towards the plane, that's pretty bogus too. Missiles are tiny and more very, very fast. Even the advanced radars on our fighter planes can't track them reliably and pilots still have to watch for the smoke trail of a missile to tell what it's doing. A radar used to track something as small as a SAM is a highly specialized set, and not the kind of radar that is used to track relatively slow aircraft from the airport. Also, when reading the theories, I keep seeing "reports of..." , "stories about...", etc., and that usually means that there never was an actual report of a radar track, only that there was something that appeared on the radar that was investigated. I spent many hours in the air looking at radar scopes and there's always a lot of crap that appears and disappears on the scope. I wouldn't be surprised at all that there was some transient crap that showed up on the radar tapes that was quickly shown to be just crap, but "un-named sources" have played up into an actual missile track over the years.
I have spent many years looking at radar scopes (30+ years) and I have seen and tracked missiles. And it isn’t an un-named source it is a seasoned aircraft accident investigator that put most of this together. Not a pilot, not a reporter, but an aircraft accident investigator, one of the few persons with the right skills and experience to do the job.
6. Lastly, when I stated that the plane blew up catastrophically I did not mean to imply that the plane just shattered. What I was getting at is that unless a missile shot is extremely lucky, and takes out the flight crew (which the evidence shows did not happen in this case) a hit from a SAM is going to give the crew plenty of time to declare and emergency. The fact that the crew did not get that chance shows that the damage waqs catastrophic and immediate, and that's just not what a SAM is capable of.
There is evidence of the debris field validated by position recordings as the material was recovered along with radar data showing the dispersal pattern that night. Also a heat-seeker when challenged with multiple heat sources will go for the center, right? And this is where there are also the A/C units on the 747 which generate a lot of heat too, so the likely impact point would be at the center fuel tank.
The conspiracy theorists need to learn the difference between the words "possible" and "probable."
I think that if someone wants to point a finger at Al Quada they should look at the crash of Egypt Air 990 in 2000. I still believe that this crash was a test case for Al Quada to see if they could get a guy to willingly kill hundreds by committing suicide with a jetliner. Up until that point it was nice theory, but not one that had actually been tried out, and I can't imagine Al Quada wanting to undertake such a large operation without first making sure it could be done. It was just over a month after the 767 crashed as the relief first officer calmly repeated "I trust in God" 11 times, that Mohammed Atta showed up in Germany to start getting his plot organized, so I firmly believe that Al Quada put the Egypt Air relief first officer up to crashing the plane, and when that went well they green-lighted Atta's operation.
