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Only 12:00 after takeoff, the center fuel tank blast rips away the bottom of the plane. the cockpit and the nose section plunge into the sea. for another half minute or so, the decapitated plane fleiss on. then it loses momentum and begins the deadly drop toward the ocean below. the fireball as seen as far as 40 miles away in connecticut just under a minute after the center tank explosion, what is left of twa 800 crashes into the sea. all those people who thought they saw a flare or a rocket or a missile, not so says the ntsb. missiles leave pock marks on the metal. this part came from an unpl...

>> twa flight 800, a 747 like this was one of several hundred flights at jfk airport that day in new york. what made it special is what it meant to the people on board. missouri sisters couldn't wait to get started on their trip to france. >> you know, i could almost visualize them, you know, on the plane having a good time, and that there would not be any sleeping i don't think. >> older sister crisha was going to be married. >> i looked at it as a last chance to be sisters and do silly things together. >> in little montoursville, pennsylvania, students and chaperones were headed to france fo...

The plane is flying without the forward third of it still attached. how does that happen? >> the airplane has momentum and it does not stop in the air when it happens so it continues with the speed and the velocity. >> there was not just one explosion. but two that doomed the plane. you see the soot on the wreckage? that second blast half a minute later erupted when the left wing tore away leaking fuel from the much larger wing tank. what created that fireball that everybody saw? >> that's as the fuel is misting into the air, it finds the ignition source and flares up to create the fireball as...

There. from the luggage under the bins where the planer to apart, the passenger seats, the landing gear, and anywhere investigators decided to find tiny imprints or tiny bits of bomb materiel imbedded in the plane, again, nothing. >> we had the overhead racks and the seats and the floor tiles and the fuel tank and all of the piece, and we saw no evidence of an explosion at all. >> promising clues turned into dead ends. bob francis ran the national transportation safety board investigation. >> traces of nitroglycerin were found in the cockpit at one point, but it turned out that somebody in fir...

Washington for testing. and the part disappeared never to be returned. >> and he and others believe that the ntsb concealed evidence and never answered questions they raised. >> twa flight 800 is a watershed moment that look at what we can get away with even in the information age. >> the film's producers has asked them to reopen up the investigation. >> we took the missile theory and the possibility that the missile brought down the plane very, very seriously, and at that time in '96, we were in a high state of alert here in the united states, and 747s don't blow up in fireballs. that plane i...