Tom Stalcup has been reviewing the science and conclusions of National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) airline crash investigations since 1997. As a physicist specializing in superconductors and high magnetic fields, he completed his graduate work at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, FL in 2000. In 2004, Stalcup founded Upward Innovations Inc., a company that designs and sells Internet-enabled satellite transmitters for weather stations.
In 1999, he co-founded FIRO (Flight 800 Independent Researchers Organization), a group of scientists, former airline crash investigators, and aviation professionals researching the crash of TWA Flight 800. FIRO's research includes fully referenced articles on critical pieces of evidence. One such review (published in July 2004) documents how key evidence recovered by Navy salvage ships never made it to the NTSB, the agency mandated by law to determine the cause of the crash.
Stalcup has given numerous talks on the crash to various organizations and has appeared on national and international broadcasts, including the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, MS-NBC, BBC radio, C-span, and a variety of other news outlets. However the media, in large part, has accepted the NTSB's official crash scenario for Flight 800 with little, if any, scrutiny or fact checking.
Stalcup founded NTSB Watch in 2004 after noticing similarities between the NTSB's handling of the November 12, 2001 crash of American Airlines flight 587 and the crash of TWA Flight 800.
