What do we know about the Adak s position?

Transcription

1 What do we know about the Adak s position? From NTSB TWA Flight 800 Exhibit 9A, Addendum 2 we have a reported distance of 5.4 miles at a true bearing of 12 degrees from TWA800. From the Coast Guard Search and Rescue Event Log. We have an entry that the Adak observed the incident and was responding to the scene. This is time marked 2039 (8:39PM). At 2109 (9:09PM) the log report states that the Adak arrived on scene.

2 From: A Coast Guardsman s story of experiencing the death of TWA Flight 800 By Shawn Vredenburg I heard the CO on the ships intercom reporting we would be coming up to full speed for a plane crash fifteen miles away. As I felt the ADAK come up to her maximum speed of 30 knots.. As we were making these preparations, a circling navy helicopter reported a liferaft. The crew was pumped, primed for action. We were ready to do anything to save those people. As we approached the position of the liferaft, it was dark from the sunset and the smoke of the huge fires. Half the horizon was fire. It surreal, like something you could only imagine seeing on television. Huge tongues of flame reaching for the sky. The smell

3 of aviation fuel and the acrid smoke from the fires, combined with the diesel exhaust from our paxman engines, made the air harsh to breathe. We saw the liferaft off of the port bow and headed for it. As we got closer, I was horrified at the sight. It was not a liferaft from a small airplane; it was an escape chute from a large airliner. This was not going to be a small SAR for a couple of people in a plane; this was a big airliner carrying hundreds of people. There, right next to the escape chute, was the first victim. A man stripped to his underwear, face down in the water. We lowered the RHIB into the water to recover him. BM2 Jeff Ruggieri and Seaman Duane Anderson were the first crew. I was on the bow of the ADAK, directing Jeff where to go to find this victim. Jeff pulled the RHIB alongside and helped Duane pull him aboard. I could see Jeff and Duane begin to pull, but then stop and let the victim slide back into the water. It is a very difficult thing, emotionally, to be in such a small boat (15 ft long) with a dead person, and I thought this is what Jeff and Duane were going through. I yelled to Jeff to do his job and get that guy on board. Jeff yelled back that he couldn t, he didn t have a head. We left him to search for any possible survivors. Soon we came to a huge debris field. There were literally millions of pieces of debris everywhere. Most pieces were unrecognizable, but I could tell what some of the larger pieces were. A piece of the tail section, a row of red seats, and a section of the overhead baggage compartment. And wherever I looked I saw the honeycombed pieces of bulkhead. And there were bodies. In this debris field there were bodies, and parts of bodies, everywhere. Some still had their clothes on, but most had some or all of their clothes ripped off. Many were

4 horribly burned or torn apart. This is when it began to hit me that there was little chance of any survivors. Jeff, in the RHIB, came into the same debris field, alongside the ADAK, and began recovering bodies. Note this report has the Adak at least 15 miles away not 5.4 miles and talks about finding a piece of the tail section and red seats.

5 Note the viewing upon arrival of a part of an engine and a whole lavatory floating intact.

6 Note the viewing upon arrival of the tail section of the aircraft.

7 Note the E5 Petty Officer 2 nd Class viewing upon arrival of the tail section of the aircraft.

8 Lt Dunn states the Adak arrived in approximately 15 minutes.

9 Note the E5 SS2 viewing upon arrival the tail section of the aircraft and a whole rest room floating intact.

10 Seaman Apprentice/Officer s Candidate stated the Adak was approximately 20 miles from the crash site and it took 30 minutes to reach the crash site.

11 * Ruggieri, a Coast Guard bosun's mate from California, had been stationed at Sandy Hook, N.J., aboard the Adak for only two months when a routine patrol brought him to the coast of Long Island during Wednesday's calm, dark night. Then a fireball lighted the sky as the last of the sunset ebbed in the western horizon. ``Some people on board actually saw the fireball, and the captain headed toward it,'' Ruggieri said. ``We did not know it was actually a plane until we got on the scene.'' During the 40 minutes it took the cutter to reach the crash, the 16 crew members prepared for a rescue, assembling fire hoses, boat hooks, life rings and heaving lines and got an orange inflatable boat ready for launch. A rescue swimmer donned a wet suit and pulled a pair of fins close. But as they neared the scene, it became apparent that this would be no routine rescue. A scene of great carnage, eerily lit by the flames of burning jet fuel, spread before them. ``It was like a movie set,'' Ruggieri said. Helicopters boomed overhead and rescue planes dropped parachute flares. Scores of fishing boats churned in a sea littered with flotsam from the plane. And bodies, dozens of them, appeared to be everywhere. Ruggieri climbed aboard the inflatable and headed into the floating wreckage. For the next several hours, it would be his task to salvage the dead. ``Few of them were intact,'' he said. ``Some were missing limbs or were decapitated. We tried not to look at the faces. If you didn't look at the faces, it wasn't personal, but we treated the bodies with dignity.''

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13 Note : NTSB witness matrix Located the Adak at 18 NM SSW of Shinnecock Inlet at the time of the event.

14 Note in the above plot at 20 miles south and 27 miles east of Islip( the origin of the grid) there is a target moving to the north north west labeled at 21 knots. This is the only radar target in that area moving towards the event. Is this the Adak? See the radar plots at the end of the document.

15 From Donaldson s report of 7/98 :

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18 Note the talk of the tail section in the RED ZONE. Below is a graphic of where Randy Adams describes seeing the tail section.

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20 Note the nose debris location and the described location of the tail will place it in the red zone. From Pat Milton's book In the Blink of an Eye she follows Ken Seebeck s Coast Guard boat (28ft) pages 10-12: "... they saw the huge tail section of a commercial jet, atilt in the water at 45 degrees, gleaming in the glare of a mile-long wall of fire. On the tail, the guardsmen could plainly see the letters TWA. Seebeck counted maybe forty windows along the wrecked section of the fuselage that adjoined the tail, though even as he looked, another window, then another, slid under the fiery surface. Half a mile away was the Coast Guard cutter ADAK... Seebeck time marks this passage "By now it was 9:20 PM" "... Seebeck told his men "Search for survivors". Slowly the men played their beams over the chaos of debris and along the receding windows of the plan's rear section as it

21 contined to slide slowly beneath the surface. Could they see faces at the windows, imploring the guardsmen to save them? Still the length of a football field away, kept back by the wall of fire, the men saw only blackened circles of glass; 30, then 20, then 10. In the garish orange light, the plane's tail appeared as a ghastly cross in a floating cemetery. Then as the men watched, the tail with its redand-white TWA logo broke off from the rest of the fuselage and fell back onto the sea, jutting up like a shark's fin. The last windows slid out of view, headed down to the ocean floor, 120 feet below." Note the description of the tail section and his location only ½ mile from the Adak and his latter time mark of 9:20PM. Here s the NTSB official view of where the debris fell.

22 The above radar plot is from 8:31 to 8:47PM. The plot is from the NTSB dataset. Each minute plotted is represented as a different color.

23 In the above plot the 8:31-8:47 plot is overlayed with 8:55PM to 9:11PM. The radar rings are 2.5 miles apart. Note the target identified as Adak.

24 The above plot is from 8:55PM to 9:15PM. Note the path of a ship moving from the south into the TWA800 debris field.

25 In the plot from 8:55PM 9:14PM, the location of the Adak s approach is marked above.

26 Outlined in red is the track of the Adak.

27 Note the Adak s location at 9:09PM.

28 The above graphic gives the P-3 location from 9:03 9:11PM.

29 The above graphic gives the P-3 location at 9:09PM when the Adak was just arriving on scene. If the P-3 was responsible for reporting a possible life raft to the Adak (that turned out to be an inflated escape chute), the P-3 made its first pass over the scene at 9:03PM. Note it was initially over the red zone and it didn t fly over the green zone until after 9:07 9:08 PM.

30 Conclusions The Adak approached the scene from the south and the initial report in 9A of 5.4 miles to the NNE is wrong. The travel time and arrival time of the Adak on radar corresponds to reports by the sailors on the Adak and the Coast Guard Event Log. The NTSB witness matrix places the Adak where we see it in the radar to the South moving to the scene. The reports of the Adak crew, Ken Seebeck on the smaller Coast Guard boat and Randy Adams (scallop boat) all agree on seeing the tail section of an aircraft. We know from the radar the Adak arrived in the southeastern end of the red zone and then sailed to the WEST. The location of these sightings of the tail section are in the RED ZONE not the green zone as reported by the NTSB.