If you haven’t read my first four posts about the crash of TWA 800, do so now.  It will give you the background to understand what is to follow.

Although flying on an airliner is a safe form of travel, perhaps the safest way to go long distances, the crash of an airliner is always front page news.  Human nature has a macabre fascination with these tragic events.  Although modern aircraft have become more and more automated, in the end it is the skill of the pilot-in-command and his crew which make the flight safe.  The greatest fear of any pilot is that his aircraft will fail to perform as designed due to a mechanical failure.  That’s why commercial aircraft are so meticulously maintained and inspected prior to each flight.

On that fateful early evening of July 17, 1996, Oliver Krick, the Flight Engineer in training, would have done a complete interior and exterior pre-flight inspection of the aircraft under the watchful eye of Dick Campbell, his Check Engineer.  Some weeks later my wife and I had the sad task of representing the Airline Pilots Association at Oliver’s funeral in a suburb of Denver, Colorado.

Being an active TWA 747 pilot myself, I had a burning desire to find out what had happened to TWA 800.  Only a few weeks earlier, I had flown that same aircraft on a flight from Athens to New York with my wife and daughter on board.  With the exception of Oliver Krick who was new to the company, I knew virtually all of the crew members, cockpit and cabin, on the flight.  So to me, it was personal.  Because of that fact, I was all the more enraged as I saw the investigation suddenly and inexplicably reverse course and come up with a “Probable Cause” so bizarre as to be almost beyond comprehension.  All of this due mainly to the actions of the FBI Agent in Charge, James Kallstrom, shown in a photo above standing in front of the reconstructed wreckage.  He instituted a takeover of the accident investigation from the normal National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) protocols due to “suspected criminal activity”, and then intimidated and later made arrests which led to the prosecution of individuals who resisted that takeover, supposedly because they had attempted to interfere with the investigation, even after the crash had been deemed to have occurred due to a suspected but not proven mechanical malfunction!  What possibly could have been his motivation to do this?

As explained in previous posts, I was at the time the ALPA Council Chairman for TWA Council 024, which represented all the international pilots at TWA.  I made a formal request that I, along with the co-pilot and flight engineer representatives for the council, be allowed to view the wreckage as it was being reassembled in a hangar at Calverton, Long Island.  Suddenly, the morning of our scheduled visit, permission was denied, although the families of the crew of USS Grapple, the salvage ship used to recover the wreckage from the sea floor, were being given a tour of the hangar the following afternoon!  What possible reason could there be to deny us access?  We were even denied the opportunity to talk to the members of the ALPA Accident Investigation Committee who were assisting with the examination of the wreckage, because we might “interfere” with the process.  I pressed this issue, and began to discover how twisted the scenario was becoming.

FBI agents were removing items from the barges arriving from the Grapple without their being properly cataloged.  When NTSB investigators protested, they were informed that the items were being taken to the FBI laboratories for “testing” and would be returned.  There is no record that they ever were of course, because they hadn’t been properly cataloged in the first place.  Cameras and film of the wreckage belonging to NTSB investigators were confiscated, and all non-FBI personnel were body searched for any items, even notes taken during the course of the day’s work, prior to leaving the hangar.  As a result, ALPA team members had to be “debriefed” at their hotel after long days in the hangar, just to try to reconstruct what they had seen during that day’s work.  This was unprecedented in anyone’s memory!  Why was this happening?

I have never been a proponent of so-called “conspiracy theories”, but the extremely unusual circumstances surrounding this investigation leave little other solutions.  I will give you my conclusions in a final upcoming post.  I believe you will find them shocking and disturbing.