Markers for three of the five area residents killed in the crash of TWA Flight 800 are lined up in a cemetery near the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Stevenson, Ala., in this 2006 photo.CLOSER TO HOMEFive residents of Stevenson, Ala., in Jackson County were among the 230 people killed when TWA Flight 800 exploded over the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island, N.Y. on July 17, 1996. Killed were Michael Scott, 44; his wife Barbara, 39; their son Joe, 13; Brenda Privette, 46; and her son Tom Weatherby, 13.Jim Hall, of Signal Mountain, who was chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board at the time of the crash and investigation, said Thursday he had declined an invitation to appear in the documentary.”We spent four years and had the very best investigators the government had working on this matter, and I think the investigation will speak for itself,” Hall said Wednesday by telephone.At the same time, he said, “we have an open investigative process with NTSB and if people have new evidence or a different opinion it would be considered.”He said he was not aware that the investigators had made a formal proposal to NTSB.”I think this is an attempt to promote the documentary. We live in the Twitter age and everybody gets his 10 seconds,” Hall said.
MINEOLA, N.Y. – Former investigators are pushing to reopen the probe into the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of New York, saying new evidence points to the often-discounted theory that a missile strike may have downed the jumbo jet.
The New York-to-Paris flight crashed July 17, 1996, just minutes after the jetliner took off from John F. Kennedy Airport, killing all 230 people aboard.
The effort to reopen the probe is being made in tandem with the release next month of a documentary that features the testimony of former investigators who raise doubts about the National Transportation Safety Board’s conclusion that the crash was caused by a center fuel tank explosion, probably caused by a spark from a short-circuit in the wiring.
“We don’t know who fired the missile,” said Jim Speer, an accident investigator for the Air Line Pilots Association, one of those seeking a new review of the probe. “But we have a lot more confidence that it was a missile.”