Your autism is hitting extreme levels, my man. No one, not one person, has said the US never shoots live stingers. No one has said the US never has live Stingers on deck. No one has argued that any branch of the military doesn't have Stingers. No one has argued that Stingers aren't sometimes fired off of large boats or beaches. You're tilting at straw men, JHS Quixote.




You've done nothing to refute this.

Several groups claimed responsibility for Pan Am 103.

Name them and show they were official claims by a representative of the "group".  It was not claimed, crackpot calls might have been made, but the US government never considered the other claims to have any merit at all.  Therefore, no one else claimed it either.

Truth right here.

Lol. 'No one claimed responsibility.' 'You don't have notarized statements and three forms of ID, so those claims of responsibility don't count.' Is it really that hard just to say 'whoops, guess I was wrong about that one'?

are you saying that when the cockpit departs the aircraft at the bulk head from an explosion, that the resulting hole directly into the rest of the plane and cabin is going to be completely NON-aerodynamic and nothing but aerodynamic drag and will be unable to zoom up in altitude due to complete disruption of airflow even over the wings and the result will be like it just hit a brick wall?

Yeah, the FBI thinks everybody is an idiot.

As Newton's first law says, an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless the front falls off, in which case it'll only move downwards regardless of it's prior momentum.

the reason why there were no direct radar data is because the aircraft broke apart. If the nose had just fallen off and the rest of the aircraft stayed intact and climbed 3000 feet, there would have been radar data, but that isn't what happens to airplanes that suffer significant structural damage while flying. The radar data ceased when the aircraft broke up from the missile detonating and destroying the aerodynamic integrity of the structure and the resulting aerodynamic forces of being at 350 knots quickly broke the airplane apart.

totally ignoring all the new destructive aerodynamic forces on very thin aluminum traveling at 350 knots

For every action there is an equal and opposite reactions, in this case that equates to the airframe being ripped apart .

So we are to believe that an explosion happens powerful enough to cause enough structural damage to have aerodynamic forces separate the cockpit from the rest of the aircraft and then the rest of the aircraft stays intact and climbs despite all the new forces that just separated the cockpit from the fuselage.

sure

People have said “you cannot fire a stinger from a ship without awakening everyone from the forecastle to the mizzenmast to the yardarm to the galley to the xyz on a big ship”

My point was “how many of the ship crew would you wake up firing from a 2-man rubber dinghy?”

Not every boat is a “ship” with a huge, hard-to-silence crew.

A stinger could literally be fired with only a single sailor/soldier/marine knowing that it happened.

“Could” is not “did” but we are talking about mathematical nonzero possibilities.

How exactly could a Stinger be fired with only one service member knowing about it? Be specific.

Using the word crackpot in this thread is hilarious.

So, the ATC radar can see a tiny Stinger missile but it can't see the debris of a 747 falling from the sky?

1) marine conducting any given activity, training, actual mission, other, is equipped with a stinger (live or inert warhead, does not matter)
2) marine is instructed to travel ship-shore with his loadout on a two man raft (but he is the only dude on it)
3) marine is a pyro and/or gets bored or loses his shit and decides to shoot it into the air halfway to shore. He is far enough from ship that no one notices his launch.
4) marine eventually returns to ship or shore. “Got into some choppy water sarge, whole damn soft bag went overboard”

Literal boat accident story.

Likely, no. But possible.

Obviously you have never been in the military.  There would be a paper trail a mile long for that stinger.  The sailor that issued it, the Officer that authorized it to be issued, the request for a replacement.  Real life is not like in the movies where every service member has his weapon, ammo, grenades, his bayonet, and a stinger in his bunk with him.  That shit is locked up and can only be issued for specific reasons.  Then the sailors on deck watch would have heard the WOOOOOOSH and seen the exhaust plume/flame.

Your latest crackpot theory shows you no nothing about MANPADS.  You don't shoot one in the air and have it search for, find and home in on an aircraft.  You have to aim it at the plane, track it while the guidance system locks in on the target then fire it.  Just shooting it blindly is a case of "big sky, little bullet".

It is considering all the crackpots that slurp up the government lies about the incident.

The hypothetical posted wasn’t meant to show how or why a marine might purposefully or accidentally shoot down a large plane at 13700 ft.

It was to show how one man could “lose” a stinger.

The most knowledgable person in the thread about stinger usage says it is million to one to hit a plane with a stinger at that altitude.

ETA: i have never been in the military but i have personally capped and detonated military owned C-4 both on bases and off bases.

I never signed any in-out paperwork for material. I am sure there is a paper record that i was present on a base on a certain day but nobody who was there would remember my name or my face or be able to link me to a particular block of C4.

I realize that the paperwork and serialization is different for C4 vs a stinger but i also realize that the paperwork is looser for stingers than for any larger missile.

The paperwork and accountability is actually much more restrictive than bigger stuff specifically because it's smaller, man portable, and ready to fire

Thanks. Makes sense. I'm guessing the variables introduced by the plane blowing apart makes the exact calculus a bit more challenging,  but in aggregate, the mass is still following a trajectory....even if in pieces.

Well....I think what I am saying is that a lot of completely dependent variables, unique to the specific explosion, will drive the outcome of the physics experiment. I would think, for a variety of reasons, that a fuselage ripped apart, fully involved in a fuel fire, and subject to both violent deceleration coupled with the blast forces of the explosion will do a lot of unpredictable things.  Maintaining course probably isn't one of them.

Neat thread y'all have here.

I know nothing on the topic (fascinating), but I can address one point: thermal batteries. These were invented to solve a requirement for certain special weapon systems. They can sit for a long, long time, be bounced around, and still be viable almost immediately upon command.

At go time, an electric match ignites something inside the assembly. This melts and catches on fire an electrolyte paste. The electrolyte, once activated, interacts with the assembly and provides electrical potential.

This can be several hundred volts for some minutes, or a few volts over the course of hours. These people also invented ni/cd batteries for the same problem.

behold:

(EDIT - I don't know what's going on there. arf doesn't like the link to the picture. whatever)

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Don't forget about where he gets bored and fires one off into the night sky halfway to shore.

The whole 'training accidents' feels more like a purposefully leaked red herring that is nothing more than a cover story designed to send people in circles and down rabbit holes. In many ways, I think this whole thing have a far more simple explanation. Someone blew the plane up. Someone didn't want anyone to know who did.

Pretty much this. Compounded by the fact that military has compromised its own integrity so much to the point that a training accident and coverup actually seems plausible.

show me where I said that ATC radar can see a stinger missile, they can barely see an airplane.

earlier i said it was not a MANPADS.

The entire" NAVY shot an airplane down" and the MANPADS thing was a deliberate distraction to the truth. When you doubt it was a MANPADS most people then think it wasn't a missile and when you doubt it could have been the Navy, then most people think it wasn't a missile.

The whole "zoomed up 3-4,000 feet when the front fell off"story  is nothing but fantasy of a reason for all the eye witnesses that saw an object leave the surface of the water and climb. Disregarding the math and the fact that people will not see 2.5 degrees of movement with no background reference ( dark sky ) makes for a reason that most people will never investigate and just accept.

This false narrative was done on purpose and is a basic distraction of the facts technique to get the public focus away from the truth.

I am agree with you.

The problem is your point is getting lost in the distraction of the unreasonable solo-sailor theory.

If a warship had a major event, and sailors all decided not to tell about it, how would we know? The only way to determine it would be from history books years later. We know, for instance, that during WWII Rear Admiral Gallery managed to get his entire task force to STFU for a year or two about having captured U-505.

Let's set aside the unprovable aspect of whether or not a crew would hold a secret like that. Offhand, I suspect it could be done with a smaller crew and sufficient threats from authorities, but it's a gamble.

More to the point, is that the Iranians claimed responsibility. They possessed multiple missile platforms capable of the shootdown. They had plenty of motive to do it. And those other reports indicate they might well have made a number of attempts on airliners with MANPADS in that timeframe, with only 800 being a successful hit. In such a theory, with a number of attempts (5-10 perhaps) being unsuccessful, it would stand to reason that the only successful hit would have occurred at the very edges of the hit probability envelope..because the shooters were also morons. Not exactly shocking for a bunch of Iranian terrorists to exhibit fundamental incompetence in the application of relatively high tech weaponry.

I'd also consider the fuel tank explosion theory, and how fundamentally weak it is. If you go peruse Wikipedia's extensive sets of civil aviation disasters, it's extremely interesting to note that there never really was any good explanation for the fuel tank explosion theory.

There are several instances in commercial aviation of fuel tank explosions leading to aircraft loss, and several were referenced in the investigation:



If you take away any piece of wreckage that shows evidence of an explosive, then yes, you're left sticking to an impossible fuel explosion theory. But consider the two listed accidents: the Avianca wasn't an electrical issue, it was a plastic explosives bomb planted by Pablo Escobar. And the Philippine Airline incident was on the ground, in hot weather, with aftermarket wiring run through the fuel tank. The tank popped, the aircraft burned down.

According to the reports, the wiring in TWA 800's tank was simply too low voltage to spark a fire. The only explanation was somehow that a higher voltage spike was thus introduced to that system, which would also have to have been frayed to cause a short in the tank.

The fact that no other accident in history remotely resembles the hypothetical circumstances required for a fuel explosion, casts severe doubt on the official NTSB finding.

TOP MEN & and the CIA were in charge of the coverup.  Unfortunately neither is very smart about airplanes so their efforts were laughable.

Honestly I'm surprised anyone believes their horse-sh!t

Most people on the street don't

A Marine is instructed to travel by himself on a rubber raft? Over a long enough distance that he's out of sight of both ship and shore? While transporting a munition subject to the two man rule? And you really think that scenario is possible?
I am so glad I asked you that because your scenario is hilarious.

Yeah, that’s going down a rabbit hole almost as ridiculous as the idea that a jumbo jet could continue to gain thousands of feet of elevation after being blown in half.

It’s likely the iranians, through hezbollah were the responsible parties for pan am 103.  But khaddafy was the favorite and easy whipping boy. Even Reagan didn’t want to effectively deal with the Iranians, and they were the ones responsible for the marine barracks at the Beirut airport bombing, through their proxies

Why do they need to follow the script that these acts must be claimed?

The entire discussion is a red herring.

https://journaltimes.com/news/national/twa-puzzle-terrorists-who-dont-claim-credit/article_f49fe77c-68e9-5924-a854-873ff1ad8cff.html



We have absolutely no reason to state that the responsible parties didn't claim responsibility. Anyone thinking otherwise is failing to consider the logical status of a deliberate attempt to suppress a successful terrorist attack.

The video of that was shown on one of the major news networks as  it was reported the flight was shot down ..I saw the clip live as it was reported someone filmed it from their porch ..The report cutoff mid report and it was never mentioned again..CBS or NBC ..later reports were that they were doing maneuvers in the area and they were dropping flares ...Like I said I saw the video on a News flash at the time

Oh....my sarcasm meter was working just fine when I read your post
I was simply expounding on my position.
In truth, I am not a physicist...nor an aviator...nor a scientist of any kind.
I'm just a guy who through the years figured out that:

1. The circumstances behind most events are far less complicated than most folks would like to believe
2. The average person truly understands a lot less than they think they do
3. We are presented a very different reflection of reality by journalists and our elected officials as compared with the world they experience first hand
4. A commonly practiced method for keeping a large groups of people from freaking out is to not share things that scare or enrage them
5. Besides first responders to an incident scene, very few people will ever really know exactly what was going on during the immediate aftermath of the incident...not specifically because of attempts to obfuscate or to conceal the truth, but because humans are fallible, and when they relay information, a lot of data can be lost / missed / misinterpreted when communicating from one discipline to another - factor in purposeful disinformation and you are going to have a hard time managing data integrity

Bottom line...the probability that this was the result of some elaborate clandestine scheme, or a government conspiracy, or some other concept of operation out of a Hollywood script starts to approach zero the further we get in time from the incident.

I don't know anyone who works as a crash investigator for the NTSB, but I imagine they have some excellent resources available to them. I would think the NTSB has qualified and capable scientists and engineers who are well equipped to analyze a crash site and form realistic hypotheses. At the same time, being a government agency, I also imagine they experience tremendous pressure to solve cases with expediency, and have investigations directed from the top down (as opposed to letting the IRT call the shots). The higher the profile of the case, the more pressure, and the more cooks in the kitchen. Then add in other support agencies with different objectives...the media playing their usual games...the executive stakeholders all looking to be the first person to hear the outcome...you get a bureaucratic shit show....which probably looks a lot less like a scientific analysis than it ought to.

But I'm just some guy on the internet...so there is that.

Explain to me how the missile theory is a red herring when it the loons keep pushing it and the rational people call it bullshit.

It was either mechanical or a bomb.  Simple.  Both of which have been consistently denied by the loons in favor of a Marine in a rubber raft.

Who was probably shooting a Stinger at the Iranian F-14 with a Hawk missile.

Detonators do.

As stated before, you are fixating on a STINGER,

1)  You will not get an accurate hit from a dingy at anything 4-6 miles away flying at 14,000 ft, especially using a night-sight (in 1996, either a Gen-1 or early Gen II NVD), as the boat motion/wave action would play hell with superelevation, and you are already fining from outside the engagement envelope for any MANPADS-configured STINGER in common use/issue in 1996.  The HINDENBERG could be flying by at that Altitude/Distance and, using those firing parameters, you would miss it with a STINGER MANPADS.

2) Everything about the destruction of TWA screams "Not a STINGER Missile" ; the initial explosion location, damage, etc all scream "not a heat-seeking/IR guided missile", the boom is too small on a STINGER, on and on.  

It was NOT a friendly shoot-down by a 1996-era STINGER in MANPADS configuration.    

FIFY

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5834111/A-secret-missile-launch-Mystery-streak-light-spotted-Washington-state-island.html

Preach it brother!  I did more paperwork for nine Singers (and had a much larger guard requirement, ASP limitations etc), than I had for 140 rounds of 155mm, 140 powder cans, 140 fuses and 1,850 rounds of .50 cal.  Also, I had to be on a Memo signed by both the Squadron Commander (Cav unit) AND the Post Safety Officer (I was an active duty LT at the time) for the Stingers, and I or one of my NCO 's (E5 Promotable  or above) had to armed and on-site at all times.  Conversely when I signed for enough ordinance to level Middleburg or Waldo, FL at Camp Blanding, we did an Round count for the projectiles, checked the seals on the powder cannisters, fuse cans and .50 cal cans, I signed two pieces of paper, we loaded the stuff into my M-548 (with a tactical forklift), and it was off to the races!  And, I was a Corporal at the time.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39432/stinger-sam-armed-marines-riding-in-rubber-rafts-were-featured-in-recent-pacific-exercise


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Um...ummmm...ummmmm.

You never served with my Stinger Detachment obviously.

Two complete Stinger cases will fit in the back of a plain jane US Navy local Issue Honda Accord (with seats folded down)...and disappear nicely under a blanket when you had to move them around a certain Middle Eastern city to get them from the pier side to the airport, to meet a resup bird from HC-2  "theoretically".. and sans this "paperwork" you speak of

"Smile and Wave boys, smile and wave at the local gate guards"

We didn't have that fancy "count all rounds" crap in the 80's.



PS, the magical Honda (Car 60) outside of the Manama Holiday Inn (2nd home) from the theoretical story...she was a magical steed in a world full of ugly and ubiquitous 1980's White Dodge US Navy Vans and freaky leased Toyota "engine aft" Vans  :)

I believe it. I bet the paperwork burden increased even more after July 1996.

Lol, wut?

I'm not telling you that Marines don't have little rubber boats. I'm telling you that a single Marine being ordered to go over the horizon in a rubber boat by himself is unbelievable even before you add the Stinger, and adding the Stinger makes it even more so.