NTSB Rejects TWA Flight 800 Missile Claim

Stephen Pope

Wednesday, July 03, 2013 at 08:17 PM ET

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Key Takeaways:

The NTSB is strongly refuting renewed claims from a documentary and former investigators that TWA Flight 800 was brought down by a missile, not a fuel tank explosion.
At a rare media briefing, NTSB investigators reaffirmed their original conclusion that a short circuit ignited fuel vapors, leading to the 1996 crash, insisting their investigation was thorough and found no evidence of foul play.
These new claims are central to an upcoming documentary and a petition to reopen the investigation, which the NTSB refused to address or allow critics to attend their briefing.

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The NTSB is pushing back — hard — to refute claims by a group of documentary filmmakers and former crash investigators who say a missile attack and not a fuel tank explosion brought down TWA Flight 800 in July 1996.

At a rare media briefing in Virginia yesterday in front of the reconstructed Boeing 747, investigators who worked on the case insisted that the NTSB and FBI investigation into the disaster was thorough. Ultimately, they said, it arrived at the correct conclusion.