Salinger's Flight 800 Theory Draws Flak   

Unanswered questions about what brought down TWA flight 800 have provided fertile ground for conspiracy theorists for months. But when Pierre Salinger, a veteran journalist and former press secretary to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, joined the fray by proclaiming at a Paris news conference that he could prove the airplane's sudden explosion was caused by a guided missile fired from a U.S. warship, questions elevated from musings in Internet discussion groups to a national debate.

"I'm still investigating," a somewhat chastened Salinger said in a recent interview, all but conceding that he might have been a mite hasty in publicly blaming the U.S. military for the tragedy. But then again, the U.S. Navy has had a bad run of accidental and near-accidental missile firings over the past few years.

While Salinger may have understandably been predisposed to think the worst, it is still highly unlikely that a guided missile fired from a U.S. warship caused the jetliner's sudden blast into a fireball of aluminum parts and parts of bodies. Here's why:

• Nearby military units were incapable of shooting down a jetliner . The only ship near TWA flight 800's flight path was the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Adak, a 110-foot-long patrol craft that carries no missiles. In fact, a retired Coast Guard officer familiar with the vessel says the Adak has no fixed armament, but does carry a few machine guns stowed below decks for emergency use.

According to Ron Lewis, a former Air Force intelligence analyst who plotted other aircraft in the area that evening, three military planes were in the vicinity, but none was a potential missile shooter. A New York National Guard HC-130P air-sea rescue support plane was flying nearby, as was an HH-60G rescue helicopter. Both aircraft were from the 106th Rescue Squadron based at Gabreski Field on Long Island, and neither type carries missiles. There was also a Navy P-3 antisubmarine patrol aircraft flying some 6,000 feet above the TWA jetliner's flight path, but the only missiles carried by P-3s are for air-to-surface attacks against enemy ships. The Navy P-3 is incapable of shooting down another aircraft with an air-to-air missile, and there is no indication from available radar tapes that anything was dropped or fired from this airplane.

• The other potential shooter was out of range. The nearest antiaircraft, missile-armed Navy warship was the USS Normandy, a cruiser equipped with Aegis, the Navy's potent radar-guided air defense system. However, the Normandy was cruising about 185 miles to the south of the TWA jetliner's path, according to government investigators. The ship's powerful SPY-1B radar can track targets out to a range of 250 miles, but the zillions of electrons pumped out by a radar antenna tend to travel in straight lines. Even at 13,000 feet the TWA jetliner would have been below the so-called "radar horizon" of the Normandy's antenna.

The Normandy would have needed to be some 34 miles closer for its radar to have spotted the climbing jetliner as it broke the horizon. In addition, every radar pulse from the warship would have triggered the jetliner to broadcast the distinctive code of a commercial airliner, known as a Mode III. The Aegis system on the Normandy would have received the code and displayed it on the warship's radar displays.

Further, the Normandy's SM-2MR "Standard" missiles could only reach out to hit targets some 40 miles away. Its missiles didn't have the range to come anywhere close to the jetliner.

• The witnesses weren't all blind. Even if the Navy had scheduled an unannounced missile-firing exercise in the immediate area on the night of July 17, dozens if not hundreds of potential witnesses surely would have seen the brilliant flash of rocket motor ignition. With virtually no clouds and three-knot winds, the glass-smooth waters would have reflected the bright flame of a missile launch like a mirror.

Yet no one reported the flash of a possible missile launch. The Standard missile is large — 14 feet long — and would have looked like a comet to anyone staring into the night sky. It also would have left a very distinct track on the local air-traffic control radars, but no such track has been reported.

Many witnesses claimed that they saw a streak of light shooting nearly straight up at the jetliner, suggesting that a much smaller missile may have been launched by terrorists from a small boat off Long Island. But at 13,000 feet, the TWA jetliner was too high for any shoulder-fired infantry air defense missile. Such weapons typically have a maximum altitude of about 5,000 feet. It would have taken an incredibly lucky hit for such a missile's puny warhead to bring down the huge jetliner. Sources close to the investigation say the probability that a missile downed the jetliner is about 1 percent or less.

Another Aegis cruiser, the USS Vincennes, did mistakenly shoot down an Iran Air Airbus, in July 1988 on a routine flight over the Persian Gulf. This tragedy was marked by obfuscation involving U.S. Naval officers all the way up the chain of command.

As for the case of TWA flight 800, Salinger deserves credit for being willing to concede that his homework may have been a tad sloppy. "I'll issue an apology if I was wrong," he says. If so, his public recantation would be an act of greater courage than the silence of admirals when the U.S. Navy really did shoot down an airliner.