Memories Stirred

Pierre Salinger Dies. His passing brings back some memories. I was stationed at Commander Patrol Wing Five, Naval Air Station, Maine from 94-98 and our P-3 Orion was in the air during the explosion of TWA flight 800 in 1996. There was various talk about how this flight might have been downed by a missile launched from a Navy vessel.

Well my group had the radar tapes from the P-3 Orion flight, heck they are probably still sitting in the same cabinet collecting dust. I never did think there was any validity to the claim but you can read one person's chronology of the investigation here. Pierre Salinger was one of the proponents of the missile theory as outlined below.

This isn't an analysis piece. I just remember Maine and all of the good times we had there. We even went back this last Summer and went camping. Maine in the fall though is about as good as it gets. So sometimes someone's passing can shine a light that uncovers positive memories in others.

Former ABC newsman Salinger dies

A longtime print journalist, Salinger switched to television reporting when he joined ABC in 1977. In the years following he worked as the network's Paris bureau chief, chief foreign correspondent and senior editor in London.

He had left the network by 1997, when he became a prominent backer of the theory that TWA Flight 800, which crashed off Long Island in 1996 on a flight to Paris, was accidentally brought down by a Navy missile.

Salinger had said at the time that a government document showed the Navy was testing missiles off the coast of New York and had been told planes would be flying higher than 21,000 feet. The Navy was unaware that Flight 800 was flying at 13,000 feet because another commercial plane was flying above it, he said.

The National Transportation Safety Board found no evidence of a missile strike. It concluded that Flight 800 was destroyed by a center fuel tank explosion, probably caused by a spark from a short-circuit in the wiring that ignited vapors in the tank.

Outside the Beltway chimes in, Pierre Salinger Dies
Backcountry Conservative also takes note, Pierre Salinger dies