Posted on 07/12/2006 11:09:51 AM PDT by Hal1950
Ten years ago this month, a Boeing 747 was climbing away from New York, headed for Paris, when an explosion ripped off the front section and sent fiery debris and bodies plunging into the Atlantic Ocean, just off Long Island.
Few crashes before or since Trans World Airlines Flight 800 have produced as many conspiracy theories, which included terrorists, stray missiles and meteorites. Hundreds of U.S. agents spent four years chasing down thousands of leads. In the end, they agreed with accident investigators that an exploding fuel tank had caused the disaster, killing 230 people.
But a decade later, steps designed to prevent another such catastrophe have yet to be fully implemented.
While much of the evidence drifted away in the Atlantic or was blown into dust before it could be analyzed, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board concluded that TWA 800 blew apart on the evening of July 17, 1996, because of an explosion of fumes in the nearly empty fuel tank in the belly of the plane. The board found evidence of high-energy electrical arcing in wires near the fuel tank that could have sent a charge into the tank itself through the fuel measuring rods that go into the tank.
"Roughly 100 percent of the civil aviation fleet has wiring problems," said John Cox, a former airline pilot who heads a consulting group called Safety Operating Systems. Cox wrote a peer review study of smoke and fire aboard aircraft that was being distributed in the aviation community.
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
bump
TWA 800 "It wasn't terrorists. It couldn't have been."
ML/NJ
Ha!
And I was only two when I shot JFK
Wasn't there also a Swiss Air flight out of NY in the 1990s that crashed into the Atlantic. And I seem to remember an Egypt Air flight as well. Planes don't fall out of the sky from high altitude--but along this particular route they seem to.
Quite possible. They only take on a full load of fuel if it's needed for the flight plus reserver. If the plane isn't fully loaded they'll take less fuel because the extra weight adds to the fuel consumption.
No, you're thinking of diesel oil; jets burn kerosene. Whenever you mix air with fuel vapours, things can go kaboom. That's why empty gas tanks give an explosion while full tanks just give a fireball.
The Swissair flight was brought down by an electrical fire in the cockpit. The crew were trying to divert to Halifax but didn't make it.
That's because the airframe acts as a Farraday cage, directing the energy around everything inside. The NTSB report cited arcing INSIDE the tank.
It's one of several tanks that are fillable independently.
A 747 burns 125 pounds of fuel a minute at idle! Most of the fuel is carried in the wings anyway.
Because the plane has at least 3 fuel tanks, and it is awesomely expensive for planes to carry more fuel than they need to reach their destination, due to the extra weight. This plane is capable of longer flights, and if it had been going to, say Moscow, this tank wouldn't have been empty.
The center fuel tank is in the wing box for the main wings. When it blew up, the wings came off. What you are saying happened, didn't.
Found this on IMDB.com:
"In the middle of the film, Dolly Parton and her colleagues send a nosy secretary to the Aspen Language Center in Colorado to learn French. The particular TWA 747 shown in the film later was used in reality on the ill-fated flight of TWA 800, which exploded off of Long Island, NY."
Kinda goes with this thread.
BTW, that was from "9 to 5"
"Why would a plane traveling from New York to Paris have a nearly empty fuel tank?"
Welllll, you know how those EMPTY tanks can explode so much better than a FULL tank would have exploded. The EMPTY tank can explode with the force of a few gallons of fuel, whereas a FULL tank explodes with 1000's of gallons of fuel, which of course isn't nearly as powerful as the empty tank full of air.
All that liquid fuel from the full tank just douses out it's own flames, especially after being ripped and cooled with air at over 400 MPH. You know, the way that Challenger was saved when the liquid tank came apart and that fuel quenched the flames out.
/sarc
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.