So what’s the SOP for airlines nowadays? Do airlines still keep center tanks unfilled? I have to imagine they would if they could, since fuel is so expensive, and weighs as much as it does.
Not into conspiracies but it was swamp gas.
It was controlled demolition, planned by the Jews and filmed in the Nevada desert…oh wait I’m getting my conspiracy theories mixed up.
[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
But that’s not the reason why I think that the missile theory for TWA 800 is bunk. It’s just this: In order for the cover-up to work at least 200 men (and more likely 400) who would have been aboard the ship that allegedly fired said missile would still have to be keeping quiet about it. I’m not claiming that every man aboard would know what target a missile was shot at. Most of them wouldn’t. But everyone aboard a Spruance, Ticonderoga, or one of the other class of ships that carries the SM1 SAM would know that there had been a launch - it really does make the ship move in an unmistakable manner.
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That depends. What kind of car is the lowest ranking officer on that ship at the time driving these days?
It was D.B. Cooper and he was wearing a parachute over his scuba gear. Saddam Hussein paid him to do it.
My dad and I were on Flight TWA 800 the Friday before the plane blew up. When we found out that it had blown up, the both of us just shrugged unsurprised. It was truly the most ramshackle, run-down, beater airplane I’d ever seen.
[QUOTE=Shodan]
Wouldn’t it? (I’m asking, not disputing.)
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As DanBlather says, it would only matter for planes which were directly over/under each other.
Think of it this way:
You have four pawns on a chess board and are going to randomly smack a single square on the chess board with a hammer. Does the odds of a pawn getting hit increase or decrease when you randomly spread the pawns out or when you gather them into the four squares at one corner? Neither, it’s exactly the same odds since you don’t need both the hammer target and the pawn position to be random to achieve randomness. So long as one of those is random, it’s a fully random process.
[QUOTE=Christopher]
That depends. What kind of car is the lowest ranking officer on that ship at the time driving these days?
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You feel a launch down the ship’s keel. It’s not as affecting as firing a gun, but, it makes the whole ship rock in an unmistakable way. I can’t really describe it: it’s not a shimmy-shake, that’s when one of the screws come out of the water in high seas; it’s not a shudder, that’s when a tug goes by in the channel, while the ship is moored; rocking is too mild a term, and really is best for describing the ship in normal to moderate seas; it’s not a slap, or slam - that’s the guns firing. (Yeah, even the piddly little 5"/54s we had). Maybe it’s just a shimmy, but that doesn’t sound right, either.
IIRC there were, aboard my ship, 10 enlisted men for every officer embarked. And, AIUI nuc ships have a higher offier-to-enlisted ratio than most. So, even using that 10:1 ratio, and the 200 man minimum crew, we’re talking at least 180 blue-shirt scum who are in the know, too. And, frankly, if this alleged conspiracy actually even discussed the possibility of bribing the blue-shirts, it’s probably the first one ever to do even that much. I’ll be blunt, I find it easier to consider that the US gov’t brought down the Twin Towers, and faked all the rest, than I can even entertain the idea that the USN would bribe blue-shirt scum.
[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
I am far from a conspiracy nut although I am an aviation buff. I won’t make any definitive statements but the TWA 800 incident still sounds very unusual to me. Commercial airliners aren’t supposed to just blow up. Jet fuel (aka diesel fuel, home heating oil, or kerosene) just doesn’t blow up under normal circumstances as attested by the millions of people that use it every day with no problems and experience almost zero true explosions. It will burn but it won’t explode except under the exactly correct conditions. I won’t say that it can’t happen but having a jet fuel explosion shortly after takeoff seems so extraordinarily unlikely to cause some very raised eyebrows.
The fact that makes me raise my eyebrows even more is that the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board didn’t freak out from this even more in a general sense. They are usually hyper-vigilant and demand manufacturer corrections and retrofits for any problem of that scale. We have 747’s in the sky right now as well as all other jet aircraft that could potentially blow up at any second based on their claims. The lack of follow-up on their end is very odd to say the least although I did read some vague cover recommendations to operators and manufacturers based on their findings.
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The reason why they’re letting the 747’s fly is that the FAA has a pretty good idea what causes airplanes’ fuel tanks to explode and what can be done about it. To summarize that long article, to have an explosion, you need fuel, oxygen, and an ignition source. If any one of the three is missing, no explosion.
One way to prevent explosions is reduce the oxygen level in the fuel tank. Boeing is testing nitrogen injection into the fuel tanks. Even though that article’s a year old, I couldn’t find any directives to implement this.
Another way is to remove fuel. The fuel in this case isn’t the liquid jet fuel but its vapors. Vapors must be within a range of concentration to support an explosion. One way to reduce the vapors is to increase the amount of liquid fuel in the tank, as the FAA’s emergency order states. Notice that the directive is not in response to TWA 800.
On TWA 800, they suspect that fuel temperatures rose dangerously due to lengthy use of the A/C unit on the ground. Apparently on 747’s the air conditioner unit is located right below the fuel tank in question and gets hot in use. There were a couple of fuel tank explosions on 737’s in warm countries prior to this incident, again suspecting fuel vaporization due to heat.
Editorializing here, now that I’ve researched this issue, I’d be much more worried about the 737’s exploding, as there are more than 5,000 of them flying versus 1,300 or so 747’s. But apparently changes in operation have successfully minimized the risk of explosion on both airplane types. At least now I understand why the FAA isn’t rushing to require the expensive nitrogen injection retrofit into the 747 fleet.
[QUOTE=MrFloppy]
Not really. The NTSB report is clearly the culmination of a lot of research and investigation and I’ll go with it although it ultimately doesn’t state the definite cause of the CFT explosion and it actually concludes that a bomb, missile or other explosion could have been the cause.
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Alas, that is often a problem with reality: there just aren’t enough data points to do a definitive reconstruction of an event. It’s what keeps the conspiracy folks busy and happy.
[QUOTE=Sage Rat]
As DanBlather says, it would only matter for planes which were directly over/under each other.
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Not to belabor the point, but that was sort of what I was saying - the flight paths tend to overlap.
Thanks for the responses.
Regards,
Shodan
[QUOTE=Shodan]
Not to belabor the point, but that was sort of what I was saying - the flight paths tend to overlap.
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It only matters for the time the planes actually overlap, not their flight plans. I would assume that amount of time is vanishingly small.
[QUOTE=Caractacus Pott]
Fisha, my thought exactly. I pray that hypoxia or flying debris knocked out all those passengers soon after the explosion. My brain just overloads trying to imagine what they went through. Very sobering, very scary for frequent fliers.
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The doctor believes they were unconscious or did not feel anything, citing the recollections of survivors of other kinds of accidents that they knew what was happening, but it was like they weren’t really there, it was dreamlike.
Salinger was the first one that I heard mention a missile and it wasn’t very long after the plane went down. I believe that he stated it as if it were a fact. Then for a while no one talked about it. That is the way that I remember it anyway.
[QUOTE=fisha]
::shudder::
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If it helps any, there’s a good chance that the shockwave from the explosion or the sudden pressurization may have resulted in unconsciousness and spared them the experience of a very long fall ending with a very sudden stop. We will likely never know for sure, but it is possible and I sure hope that was the case.
[QUOTE=Fear Itself]
What kind of a missile would be required to hit an airliner flying above 13,000 feet? The Stinger shoulder fired missile has a range up to altitudes of only 12,500 feet, so it is unlikely that could have been used. What other missiles might have been available to any supposed terrorists? I doubt it could have been a truck-mounted radar guided missile, so let’s limit speculation to light weight shoulder fired missiles.
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I don’t think TWA was shot down by a missile, I think it was a center fuel tank explosion. That said, I and several other people on this board a few years back figured out how to exceed the 12,500 limitation on the shoulder-fired missiles at a very low cost. It should be something a pilot could figure out without much trouble, which no doubt accounts for some of the continued scrutiny of pilots. Also, it probably factors into some of the Temporary Flight Restrictions around VIP’s and important events. I’m sure the FBI, CIA, FAA, military, etc. have also figured this out. I will not share the details with the board, as it would basically be providing the blueprints for a criminal act, and if you figure it out you might want to keep mum, too.
The point being that a shoulder-fired missile could have been involved and if the fuel tank in question had shown signs of missile damage (as opposed to internal explosion) such possibility would have needed to be investigated.
[QUOTE=ElvisL1ves]
There’ve been a number of other fuel-tank vapor explosions on other aircraft as well, with no real question as to what was the cause. It’s just crazy how many people think it had to be something else.
The photos of the recovered TWA 800 wreckage also make it pretty clear that’s where it started. The metal is bent *outward * from the tank, in all directions - the explosion therefore had to have occurred inside. How’d the bomb or the meteorite get there?
Amazing how the government can’t do anything else right, but is nevertheless ruthlessly efficient at coverups, innit?
It’s even a standard joke by now that, any time an airplane crashes for whatever reason, there’ll be somebody on the evening news saying “Ah seen a big ol’ fireball in the sky…”
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http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmtuskegee1.html Is a 40 year cover up good enough for you.
Hello all,
I understand what the arguments are above about the possibility of the center tank exploding given the right condition. But at the same time I still find it hard to digest as applies to this accident for the following reasons:
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A packed airliner sitting on the tarmac on a hot day with both A/C packs running. We’ve had these kinds of conditions before. Airliners operate out of hot airfields on a regular basis. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Las Vegas, Phoenix are a few places that come to mind and have been doing it for years. The 747 has been in service IIRC since 1970. To me it seems that such an accident should have happened sooner than the 26 years that this type of aircraft was in service.
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The spark source inside the tank. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the technical specs for the tank electronics require that the operating voltage be low (~ 3 volts) enough that sparking would not be possible? What was the ignition source for those exploding tank tests? If they used a spark plug then it definitely would be at a much higher voltage than the electrical systems used by Boeing.
And a comment about military cover-ups. I do agree that something like this, if indeed caused by a missile launch would be pretty difficult to cover up. But at the same time I can see them trying to do so, considering how humiliating and scandalouus it would be if it were true. It certainly would be fairly consistent with past events (radiation leaks, toxic waste, etc) and government attempts to cover those things up. Gonzomax, your post above is exactly what I’m talking about. Based on what we know about previous government scandals and secrets I feel there’s enough benefit of the doubt going around to keep an open mind.
[QUOTE=gonzomax]
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmtuskegee1.html Is a 40 year cover up good enough for you.
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Is it a cover-up if no-one really cares enough to ask questions? I’ve heard of this before, and I’ve never got the impression it was some super-secret hush-hush operation - they just did did their mad doctor thing and no-one really asked why exactly they were using black folks as lab rats rather than e.g. lynching them in traditional fashion. As soon as a reporter got to hear of it, game over. No attempted bribes, death threats, faked documentation, or any other major conspiracy stuff, just “trust us, we’re doctors, it’s for your own good. Or the good of humanity. Or because we’re curious, or whatever. Now do some knee bends.”
Telling several hundred people to just forget about the fact that they were involved in shooting down a jumbo jet full of their fellow citizens seems like a bit of a different kettle of fish.
[QUOTE=ntcrawler]
Hello all,
- The spark source inside the tank. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the technical specs for the tank electronics require that the operating voltage be low (~ 3 volts) enough that sparking would not be possible? What was the ignition source for those exploding tank tests? If they used a spark plug then it definitely would be at a much higher voltage than the electrical systems used by Boeing.
[/QUOTE]
I believe the working theory is that a larger voltage was introduced to the Fuel Quality Indicating System wiring via a short somewhere else outside of the tank.
[QUOTE=ntcrawler]
2. The spark source inside the tank. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the technical specs for the tank electronics require that the operating voltage be low (~ 3 volts) enough that sparking would not be possible? What was the ignition source for those exploding tank tests? If they used a spark plug then it definitely would be at a much higher voltage than the electrical systems used by Boeing.
[/QUOTE]
Wuh? When I was a kid messing around with batteries I could get a spark out of a 1.5 volt circuit. And what would a spark plug be doing inside a fuel tank anyhow?
What about a short in some wiring? Wouldn’t that be enough?