In a different discussion TWA 800 was brought up as it related to in-tank explosive fuel/air mixtures. TWA 800 was a Boeing 747 which departed NYC and during climb-out toward its’ cruising alittude suddenly exploded killing all aboard. There were many wild rumors of terrorism, mutiny, and U.S. Navy rocket-firings gone-astray… and it took months for an official investigation to be completed by the NTSB.
The NTSB …THEORIZED….(and I emphasize that because NTSB only postulated it was the boards OPINION ….that a Center Tank filled mostly with vapors (jet fuel/kerosene) ignited, POSSIBLY due to heat generated from outside forces (Aux Power Unit, etc) while sitting on the ground before departure, which facilitated an explosive gas-mixture (via heating the residual fuel in that tank) …and that an electrical short or spark provided the ignition to cause the in-flight explosion. Boeing vigorously denied that possibility, and offered the fact that many 747s with the identical fuel system have been operating for 4 or more decades without any Center tank fires, and that the 747 fuel system is closely copied in thousands of other aircraft none of which have suffered such failures.
The aircraft wreckage was scattered and sank in the ocean making reconstruction and positive identification of the exact cause very difficult with a wide possibility of erroneous conclusions. HOwever NTSB is charged with identifying the “likely“ or most-likely cause and their report is available for anyone who wishes to read it.
I am a retired airline transport pilot, flight instructor, FAA-designated pilot examiner,/ Training Center Evaluator, and former mfr’r production test pilot. I have my own theory which is equally (at least in my mind) plausible for the cause of that in-flight explosion.
While it may seem wild theory to most people, my 50+ year professional piloting experience has led me to have my own near-conviction as to a possible cause:
I have witnessed, usually at night, several near-misses of meteors near my aircraft. I was humorously jested by my crewmembers over my suggestion that some day I will die in an airplane struck by a meteor…. The jokes would give the jester great pleasure lightly ridiculing my theory in front of other crewmembers at the cocktail-bar at the end of the day…. …until they flew with me at night and saw it occur…and then they usually shut up with the jokes.
This pre-monition has been with me since around 1974 when I flew for a (now defunct) airline which operated/hub-ed at DFW. I had already witnessed a 3 or 4 near-misses of meteors while flying . (Being low-seniority I often ended up with less-preferred night flight schedules in my early career.)
On one later occasion, in 1980, having departed KIAH (then known as Houston Intercontinental but subsequently renamed to honor GHW Bush) … my crewmember and I were westbound and into a cruise-climb configuration on auto-pilot. I was “pilot flying” and JM McGrath was ”pilot monitoring” and he was filling out our manifest, wt and bal, paperwork on the current flight. It was after 10PM and the cockpit was in lowered-lighting for nightime visibility. I looked over to see what time he was entering for our actual time of lift-off …when the entire darkened cockpit was brilliantly illuminagted with a green-GLOW… from a passing meteor which was estimated to pass from behind us (East) to ahead of us (West)… passing directly overhead in a descent and dissappearing into the dark terrain 50 miles or more ahead of us. The light from that meteor completely overwhelmed our cockpit lighting to the degree that the flight-manifest was completely readable and the entire cockpit illuminated as if we’d turned on a large green overhead Dome Light or “Storm Lighting” (a feature of that airplane had cockpit flood-lights to prevent pilot blindness from nearby storm lightning… we normally only used that lighting to perform a pre-flight inspection of a newly-assigned cockpit at night before passenger baording.)
The comments made of that bright green meteor were profane.
The next day, a local news story appeared in the Texas A&M Univ. paper that a meteor had struck the woods just west of the local airport in College Station and A&M students were out attempting to find the remains.
McGrath and other crewmembers quit ridiculing my premonition that a meteor will some day strike my aircraft.
Back to TWA800: There were numerous “eye witnesses” who claimed that they saw a white trail of “smoke” or fumes from a rocket which climbed up from a nearby U.S. Navy missile frigate participating in an exercise off-shore of Long Island…toward the 747…which rapidly became a consipracy-theory/rumor that a missile had accidentaly shot down 800.
The subsequent denial by the Navy only furthered the conspiracy theories….and the NTSB pooh-pooh-ed the theory despite several witnesses claiming they saw that trail of smoke shooting upwards toward the flight.
It’s my personal theory that meteors don’t come down through the atmosphere only at night. I believe they do this all day long…and many many times without any observation whatsoever.
The wreckage widely scattered along the sea-floor amonst the mud and rocks would not be likely allow a meteor fragment (if it survived the disintegration of atmospheric-penetration) to be distinguised from the common rocks and non-aircraft objects lying all around. I doubt anyone would be able to identify an incandescent, hot-glowing rock which fell thru the upper atmosphere and passed thru an airliners’ fuel tanks…rupturing the tank…exposing the ullage (fuel vapors) to the air …and creating an explosive mixture sufficient to blow-apart a Boeing 747.
That…. I believe is a much more believable theory than that a single Boeing fuel system in one airplane blew up while thousands of other similar airplanes never do.
YMMV
The NTSB …THEORIZED….(and I emphasize that because NTSB only postulated it was the boards OPINION ….that a Center Tank filled mostly with vapors (jet fuel/kerosene) ignited, POSSIBLY due to heat generated from outside forces (Aux Power Unit, etc) while sitting on the ground before departure, which facilitated an explosive gas-mixture (via heating the residual fuel in that tank) …and that an electrical short or spark provided the ignition to cause the in-flight explosion. Boeing vigorously denied that possibility, and offered the fact that many 747s with the identical fuel system have been operating for 4 or more decades without any Center tank fires, and that the 747 fuel system is closely copied in thousands of other aircraft none of which have suffered such failures.
The aircraft wreckage was scattered and sank in the ocean making reconstruction and positive identification of the exact cause very difficult with a wide possibility of erroneous conclusions. HOwever NTSB is charged with identifying the “likely“ or most-likely cause and their report is available for anyone who wishes to read it.
I am a retired airline transport pilot, flight instructor, FAA-designated pilot examiner,/ Training Center Evaluator, and former mfr’r production test pilot. I have my own theory which is equally (at least in my mind) plausible for the cause of that in-flight explosion.
While it may seem wild theory to most people, my 50+ year professional piloting experience has led me to have my own near-conviction as to a possible cause:
I have witnessed, usually at night, several near-misses of meteors near my aircraft. I was humorously jested by my crewmembers over my suggestion that some day I will die in an airplane struck by a meteor…. The jokes would give the jester great pleasure lightly ridiculing my theory in front of other crewmembers at the cocktail-bar at the end of the day…. …until they flew with me at night and saw it occur…and then they usually shut up with the jokes.
This pre-monition has been with me since around 1974 when I flew for a (now defunct) airline which operated/hub-ed at DFW. I had already witnessed a 3 or 4 near-misses of meteors while flying . (Being low-seniority I often ended up with less-preferred night flight schedules in my early career.)
On one later occasion, in 1980, having departed KIAH (then known as Houston Intercontinental but subsequently renamed to honor GHW Bush) … my crewmember and I were westbound and into a cruise-climb configuration on auto-pilot. I was “pilot flying” and JM McGrath was ”pilot monitoring” and he was filling out our manifest, wt and bal, paperwork on the current flight. It was after 10PM and the cockpit was in lowered-lighting for nightime visibility. I looked over to see what time he was entering for our actual time of lift-off …when the entire darkened cockpit was brilliantly illuminagted with a green-GLOW… from a passing meteor which was estimated to pass from behind us (East) to ahead of us (West)… passing directly overhead in a descent and dissappearing into the dark terrain 50 miles or more ahead of us. The light from that meteor completely overwhelmed our cockpit lighting to the degree that the flight-manifest was completely readable and the entire cockpit illuminated as if we’d turned on a large green overhead Dome Light or “Storm Lighting” (a feature of that airplane had cockpit flood-lights to prevent pilot blindness from nearby storm lightning… we normally only used that lighting to perform a pre-flight inspection of a newly-assigned cockpit at night before passenger baording.)
The comments made of that bright green meteor were profane.
The next day, a local news story appeared in the Texas A&M Univ. paper that a meteor had struck the woods just west of the local airport in College Station and A&M students were out attempting to find the remains.
McGrath and other crewmembers quit ridiculing my premonition that a meteor will some day strike my aircraft.
Back to TWA800: There were numerous “eye witnesses” who claimed that they saw a white trail of “smoke” or fumes from a rocket which climbed up from a nearby U.S. Navy missile frigate participating in an exercise off-shore of Long Island…toward the 747…which rapidly became a consipracy-theory/rumor that a missile had accidentaly shot down 800.
The subsequent denial by the Navy only furthered the conspiracy theories….and the NTSB pooh-pooh-ed the theory despite several witnesses claiming they saw that trail of smoke shooting upwards toward the flight.
It’s my personal theory that meteors don’t come down through the atmosphere only at night. I believe they do this all day long…and many many times without any observation whatsoever.
The wreckage widely scattered along the sea-floor amonst the mud and rocks would not be likely allow a meteor fragment (if it survived the disintegration of atmospheric-penetration) to be distinguised from the common rocks and non-aircraft objects lying all around. I doubt anyone would be able to identify an incandescent, hot-glowing rock which fell thru the upper atmosphere and passed thru an airliners’ fuel tanks…rupturing the tank…exposing the ullage (fuel vapors) to the air …and creating an explosive mixture sufficient to blow-apart a Boeing 747.
That…. I believe is a much more believable theory than that a single Boeing fuel system in one airplane blew up while thousands of other similar airplanes never do.
YMMV
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