Joe Brancatelli on Business Travel
Airlines Feared a 'Friendly Fire' Disaster; Have We Had Our
First?
Joe Brancatelli
July 21, 1997
A day after the downing of TWA 800 last July, an executive
of an international airline invited me to lunch. From the
moment I slid into the banquette at his stodgy private
club, I knew this was going to be a different kind of lunch
altogether."So what's your take on TWA 800?" the executive
asked before I could settle in.The question stunned me.
Over all the years I had known this guy, he never
speculated on matters of safety or security, and once said
sourly, "Never say 'crash' to an airline guy" when I
jokingly asked about the "crash" of his company stock
price."Well," I stammered. "I mean, there's no 'good' news
here. If it was a missile, there's gonna be hell to pay. If
it was terrorism, the recriminations and the security
measures will be positively fascist. And if it was
mechanical, it was catastrophic failure like we've never
seen before.""It was a missile," the executive said evenly.
"Friendly fire. We kept telling the military this would
happen one day. And the bastards just kept doing it and
doing it. And now hundreds of people are dead."I didn't say
anything. We didn't even have water on the table yet and
here was this wild accusation from an airline guy I
considered Mr. Button Down. I took a quick mental inventory
of what I knew about him: He was former military, his son
was a TWA pilot, and we'd had a brief conversation a couple
of months back when one of his airline's planes was chased
by two military fighter jets across the North Pacific."What
are we talking about?" I finally managed to mumble.Grimly,
the executive laid out his theory: TWA 800 took off, was
picked up on radar by U.S. fighters, and then was made the
"target" by a giddy pilot. As so often happens, this
military pilot was playing an ad hoc war game: lock onto a
commercial jet, make believe its an enemy plane, then blow
it out of the sky. Only this time, the executive insisted,
something went terribly wrong and the game turned real."For
years we've been complaining about the military locking
onto commercial jets and using them for target practice,"
the executive said. "We go down to the Pentagon and bitch
and they promise it'll never happen again. Then, when it
does happen again, the brass says, 'no harm, no foul.' I
think they just fouled."Over the course of this very
peculiar lunch, the airline executive also laid out several
eerie scenarios: Watch the government attempt to discredit,
then ignore, then awkwardly explain away the eyewitness
accounts that support the "missile theory." Watch the
President make an unprecedented gesture to the families of
the TWA 800 victims. Watch how the cockpit recorders will
reveal no signs of crew comments indicating mechanical
failure. Watch how a mechanical problem will be vaguely
blamed, yet no 747s will be grounded.Most of all, he said,
"Watch the players.""What do you mean, 'Watch the
players?'""Joe," he said, as if quizzing a befuddled child,
"Who has the statutory authority to investigate air crashes
in this country?""Well," I said, "The National
Transportation Safety Board, except if...""Except if there
is criminal activity involved and then the FBI is in the
mix.""So," I wondered, "What's the point?""Like I said,
watch the players. Forget about what they say and what they
do. Eventually, they will tell you its not a bomb, it not
a missile, its a mechanical. But watch how the FBI doesn't
go away. If its a mechanical, the FBI has no legal
authority to be anywhere near the NTSB. But watch how the
FBI will never go away."I left that luncheon scared. I
wondered how a right-thinking, by-the-book airline
executive become a conspiracy freak.Except...Except how
come no airline executive I know thinks this luncheon
conversation was strange? How come, whenever I ask about
TWA 800, they obsess about the number of times their
aircraft have been "targets" of military jets playing war
games?Except how come everything that airline executive
predicted during that lunch has come true?The government
has gone to extraordinary--sometimes laughable--lengths to
discredit, ignore, then explain away eyewitness accounts.
President Clinton and the First Lady did take the
unprecedented step of flying to Kennedy Airport to console
the families of the TWA 800 victims. They didn't fly to
Detroit in January to comfort the families of the victims
of the Comair crash and they didn't go to Florida to
comfort the families of last year's ValuJet crash. How come
the cockpit recorders didn't yield any clue of a mechanical
failure? How come no 747s have been grounded if there
really is a catastrophic problem with their center fuel
tanks?And, how come, if you watch the players, the FBI is
still intimately involved with the investigation more than
a year out?Deputy FBI director James Kallstrom has shadowed
the NTSB since the moment TWA 800 went down. He tells
anyone who listens that there's no evidence of a bomb or a
missile. Yet he told Congress as recently as July 10 the
FBI will remain involved in what should otherwise be
strictly NTSB business.Something is very wrong here, fellow
travelers. Very wrong.
Joe Brancatelli, a veteran business journalist based in
Cold Spring, New York, writes weekly on business travel for
TheTrip.com. He also has written for a wide range of print
publications, including the Los Angeles Times and Fortune
magazine.
