Trevor Collins

But with this, the reconstruction after the kind of recovery effort, this leads us kind of into the theories, which are almost merged with the investigation.

Now, there are three interesting theories, two of which come almost immediately after the event.

And the third one we're going to discuss is the NTSB consensus that they feel very confident about and I believe took a few years to really dial in this understanding.

So I guess maybe you start with like the big sections of the fuselage and go from there.

Yeah.

Massive undertaking, man.

Yeah.

So with this reconstruction now underway, the early on investigation kind of focuses on what several witnesses stated they saw.

And it comes back to that orange streak of light that people saw that seemed to come from the ground, go up to the air and conclude with an explosion.

Oh, I forgot about that.

Yeah, dude, so let's come back.

And so a lot of people thought from this that it must have been a missile because some people kind of reported that there was a missile contrail near the plane at the time of the explosion, right?

The smoky trail that comes out of the back of a missile.

This led authorities to speculate that there was potentially an act of terrorism.

While the NSTB could not investigate the criminal implications of the crash, they brought the FBI in to investigate.

In order to do this, the two organizations had to create kind of a workflow when it came to investigating evidence, making sure that nothing was lost in communication, respecting jurisdictions of who owns what, but also in doing that, like you're saying, it creates all this extra paperwork.

And so it does make the process a little bit more lengthy, but it allows them to look deeply into this.

So, some reports state that the FBI found trace amounts of explosive residue on three samples across three separate locations of the plane.

However, while the FBI believed that this could point to missile activity, the NTSB was hesitant to label it as such.

It's unclear why they were reluctant or hesitant.