that saw this event. some initial reports that evening showed some anomalies on one of the radars that was mistaken by someone from the faa as a missile hitting the plane. and later on, it was determined to be some sort of electrical interference that happens all the time. but sure, the radars were critically important. the fbi hung on to every bit of the radar data and they tried and tried and tried to connect those dots, if you will, and despite their best efforts, they were not able to prove that was a missile that came up to hit the airplane. as time went on and the pieces of the puzzle started to come together, we had the string of connected dots that lead us to the center fuel tank. we know the center fuel tank exploded. that s a fact. the question was, what caused it
conclusively the whole break-up sequence of the airplane. we have a giant pile of evidence that leads directly to the initial event being this explosion within the fuel tank. the tank is pretty big, 20 by 20, four to six feet high. the bottom tank is supposed to be perfectly flat. the pieces that we recovered on the airplane have a definite bow in it. they were pushed out from the inside. if you go above it, it is pushed upwards into the cabin. so whatever happened happened inside the tank. west bank the center fuel tank exploded. that s a fact. the question was, from the day we said the center fuel tank blew up, three or four months out, what caused it to blow up? so ntsb is looking at all the pieces of the airplane for blast. where did the bomb blow up? we found traces of high
with this we really do have a missile. with this we really do have an aircraft shot down. it s not the first one either. flight 007 actually crashed as well the same manner. mary, we were talking about this, you and i when we were reporting on 370 about what people thought about flight 800. we had a conversation with the gentleman who thought that, you know, he saw missiles and that this plane was actually hit by a missile. it turns out it wasn t. it was a center fuel tank, right? that s correct. and of course, the plane has reassembled and is preserved to this day as a teaching tool in virginia. and you can see from the wreckage, it s very apparent about that. and then also the explanation on the tapes. and once the nose cone came off, the nose of the plane, rather, why it pitched up. but, you know, in terms of shoot-downs, though, there is a pretty defined group. once you get past world war ii, there are about a dozen. and they do have some common characteristics. so terrorism an
core part of the aircraft. that s where the center fuel tank is, that s where the fuel from the fuel in the wings are funneling back to the engines. it s the most flammable part of the plane. it s also the strongest part of the aircraft. you can t get investigators in here right now. you need them in here desperately. how much difference does it make that this guy is here, this other people are walking through this site? well, it is very disturbing. i mean you cannot have people just picking through parts sometimes there are very small parts that make a big difference. sometimes there isn t. but in any case, when i was at the ntsb we prosecuted people who were standing doing things like that. what can you tell from some of the bigger pieces, even from the photographs here? this is an interesting piece. eerily, like some of the large pieces from twa 800, what you see is a tear. you also see no sooting. it was obviously probably a later piece of the plane that
the whole airplane breaking apart. we believe the nose broke off forward to the wing. that came right down, straight down and the engine is still producing the same amount of power, so it s going to go up because it s lighter. the airplane rose and continued to climb for a few thousand feet more ending up in the 16,000 foot range and you have a lot of fuel being mixed with air and already a fire from the center fuel tank is now the fire gets to be quite large and noticeable. there were some witnesses that saw a rising streak of light. we believe this is from the nose section coming off, the residual fire burning and the airplane rising up and creating what appears to be a vertical streak of light. from the ntsb s point of view and fbi s point of view, the