Word: tanks
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...Transportation Safety Board revealed in hearings held in Baltimore last week, minuscule can mean sinister. Calmly, patiently, safety-board explosion expert Merritt Birky explained that a spark carrying one-quarter millijoule of energy was all that was necessary to ignite the contents of the 12,890-gal. central fuel tank of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 off Long Island--a tank that then exploded, destroying the plane and killing all 230 people aboard...
...didn't take a missile. It didn't take a meteorite, a bullet or even a bird. In fact, the safety board still doesn't know the exact source of the spark that presumably ignited Flight 800's mostly empty central fuel tank, a container similar to those sloshing just below passengers' feet in many commercial carriers. But the trigger's precise identity may be disturbingly moot. In a week of technical testimony considerably more alarming than had been expected, safety-board chairman James Hall made it clear that the fuel, transformed from a stable liquid state to volatile vapors...
...millions of Americans who will soon participate in the second busiest travel week of the year. James McIntyre speaks only for himself. An air-accident investigator, McIntyre observed the hearings as an ex-pilot who flew TWA's New York-Paris route repeatedly with a nearly empty central tank. (Drained to reduce weight, it was filled only for longer flights.) Asked if he'd try it again after the week's disclosures, he replied carefully, "I wouldn't have a problem--in the wintertime...
...Hall's fears for the future. His primary frustration involved a long-held industry custom. Designers have always--"since the first airplane," noted Daniel Cheney, an FAA manager--understood the dangers inherent in cramming electricity into a narrow airborne hull with the flammable vapors that can result when a tank is hot and mostly empty, but they have addressed the problem primarily by isolating or eliminating the sources of possible sparks. Their assumption that further precautions involving the fuel tanks were unnecessary has historically been supported by the FAA, whose sometimes contradictory mandate requires it to tend both the airline...
...huge surprise of last week's testimony was the determination that when a mostly empty fuel tank gets as hot as TWA 800's was (about 145[degrees] at takeoff, because of the 400[degree] exhaust thrown off by air-conditioning units a foot away), the electrical charge necessary to detonate the resulting fumes is roughly a quarter of the smallest spark you feel when scuffing your foot on a rug. Said safety-board officer Peter Goelz: "We had no idea how little energy it took to cause an explosion." Hall remarked, "I for one don't see how every...