If you had told me on the morning of July 7 that I would have lunch on July 8 with the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, I would have likely countered with tales of flying pigs or Hamlet-writing monkeys.
I knew the odds. In 2013-14, the TWA 800 Project Team made a systematic attempt to get the NTSB to reopen the investigation into the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800. The Project Team included high-level whistleblowers, family members of the victims, and eyewitnesses. Collectively, team members had a whole lot more juice than I did, but for all their good efforts, they never got past the NTSB’s designated flak catchers.
So color me thunderstruck to find myself dining at Harry’s Smokehouse Burgers & BBQ in the Pentagon Mall with former board member Vernon Grose and current chairman of the five-member board Chris Hart.
TWA 800: The Crash, th...
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Grose made this all happen. A day earlier, he had attended a press conference on TWA Flight 800 held at the National Press Club and sponsored by Accuracy in Media (AIM). Although Grose was not scheduled to speak, AIM‘s Roger Aronoff invited him to the podium, and he held forth for about ten minutes.
“I am absolutely convinced there was a cover-up,” Grose told the audience. That said, even Hillary Clinton would be hard-pressed to call him a conspiracy theorist. An applied physicist and a former air traffic controller, Grose knows as much about plane crashes as anyone in America. If proof is needed, on the night of the TWA 800 disaster – July 17, 1996 – CNN called him into its studio to provide expert on-air commentary. This he did for the next six hours.
At the time, Grose had no reason to distrust the authorities. In fact, during the next two years, he would do more than 170 interviews on the crash, all generally supportive of the investigation. The deeper he looked, however, the more distrustful he became. Now, he too is convinced that a missile or missiles destroyed TWA 800.
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Although we had talked on the phone numerous times, Grose and I had never met. After the AIM press conference, he casually noted he was having lunch with Hart the next day and, almost as an afterthought, asked if I would like to join them. Sure, I said. Why not?
Hart had no idea I would be there, but he accepted my presence gracefully. Grose had a signed copy of my book with him and openly plugged it. For my part, I talked about this and that, trying to establish some sort of bond with Hart and convince him of my sanity.
One point of common interest did emerge. Hart mentioned he had served on the board from 1990 to 1993 before being replaced by Jim Hall. “That was you?” I said. “I wrote about that.” I remembered a good part of what I had written, specifically the quote by a Washington Post columnist who described Hall as “a politically connected white male Democrat whose only transportation experience apparently is a driver’s license.” Hart laughed. He told me he cut that column out and saved it.
