At twilight, a TWA 747 makes a routine take off from JFK International in New York City. A few minutes later a terrific explosion separates the nose and cockpit from the rest of the airplane. The remainder of the airplane, the fuselage, wings, and passenger cabin with more than 200 passengers continues its climb engulfed in flames for another thousand or more feet before spinning over and disintegrating over the sea. A horrible death for the passengers, blasted by fire and a 300 knot wind, lasting several terrifying minutes before it finally ends.
In the mid 1990s, there had been several terrorist attacks on American soil -- an attempt to bring down the Twin Towers, Timothy McVeigh blowing up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, a bomb aboard a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland. Several eyewitnesses to the crash of the 747 claimed to have seen a missile strike the airplane and the FBI was called in. There was a jurisdictional dispute between the FBI and the National Transportion Safety Board which evidently was never fully resolved.
In any case the remnants of the airplane were brought in from the sea and patched together in a warehouse on Long Island. A complete and detailed investigation of the wreckage shows no evidence of a bomb or missile, so the investigators must look elsewhere. What they found was a conclusion worthy of Sherlock Holmes, an unfortunate juxtaposition of events, each of minor importance in themselves, yet conjoining to make a disaster.
It was about at this point that the FBI made a public announcement that they had found explosive residue on the wreckage, which was either false or misleading, yet to someone with a hammer everything begins to look like a nail. The media and the public, meanwhile, are going ape with conspiracy theories involving terrorists and the US Navy. The end result was that the NTSB went to extraordinary lengths to prove that it was an accident. One of the things they did was replicate the original flight down to the slightest detail, something no power on earth could get me to do.
I can't go into details but the NTSB found that the fuel in the center tank had become flammable, which wasn't supposed to happen, that the tank was not strong enough to contain the explosion, and that the fuel vapors had blown up because of a spark caused by a short circuit in the 180 miles of wiring they examined bit by bit. Four years after the accident the NTSB issued its report, along with recommendations for correcting the problem. The FBI agreed. Achieving the solution was a heroic feat.