Please check out this report on fuel tank ignition prevention measures I posted a week ago. A good start would be paragraph 6 of the Background section, page 16014 at the bottom. Don’t worry, this report starts at page 16013. 747’s aren’t blowing up left and right because fuel tanks are explosive only under certain circumstances. As it summaries, a fuel tank needs all three of the following for an explosion: fuel, oxygen, and an ignition source. The report gives figures on circumstances that make the fuel/oxygen mixture combustible, including temperature and altitude, then goes on to say that the FAA emphasized preventing an ignition source within the fuel tank.
One could glean from this report that it’s pretty hard to cause a fuel tank explosion under normal circumstances, but it’s not impossible. All the holes in the Swiss cheese have to match up, so to speak, and did on TWA 800. If I were good with numbers, I could show statistically how low a probability this accident was, but, alas, I’m not. One explosion out of tens of thousands of takeoff/landing cycles is a low but not zero number.*
Those planes you mentioned in Saudi, Dubai, and Vegas with their AC’s running could have had more than enough fuel to prevent the fumes from reaching combustibility, the fuel tank temperature either didn’t get hot enough or got too hot for the fuel to create combustible fumes, and/or there was no ignition source within the tank if fumes were combustible. The holes in the cheese thankfully didn’t line up for them. And probably won’t because there are relatively easy steps airlines can take to prevent these explosions.
Actually, this article’s last paragraph says that we should expect a center fuel tank explostion about every 54 months, assuming no remediation action was taken.
A bigger problem with the terrorism theory is that it makes no sense. Terrorists do not randomly and anonymously shoot planes down where few if any people will see. They want to cause personal, immediate, visible disasters. The goal is humiliating a target govenrment/ethnicity/nation/whatever and demonstrating their helplessness while hopefully inducing them to oppress a given populace or withdraw from an affected area.
The last point bears some explanation because people will not understand it. A basic element of terrorist theory - and yes, there is one - is that the terrorists do not yet have the support of the populace at large. In order to get that, they deliberately commit monstrasities to induce the target to begin oppressive policies which will alienate the populace. This will, in theory, lend support for the terrorists. Terror forces can rarely affect long-term policy or steal power;they need to become guerrillas to do that. But transitioning from a terror force to a guerrilla force is difficult.
In this case, there was no obvious link to any terror group or goal, no credible claimants who could have done it, and seemingly no motive.
I won’t go into the “secret government weapon testing” theory because it’s even more ridiculous.
But there is no “government”. There are a bunch of disparate organizations, each with its own institutional culture and its own institutional prerogatives and interests, each composed in turn of dozens or hundreds or many thousands of human beings. I can see being suspicious if an organization is asked to investigate itself–that’s a classic case of conflict of interest, and the invididual human beings doing the investigating may be sufficiently motivated by esprit de corps or the “thin blue line” or whatever it is to cover up for their friends and colleagues.
But this isn’t a case of the FBI investigating alleged misconduct by the FBI; or military officers investigating an alleged screw-up by the military they’re a part of. Flight 800 was investigated by the FBI and the NTSB, neither of which would have any particular institutional interest in covering up a colossal screw-up by the U.S. Navy. The NTSB in particular would have its entire reason for being shot to hell if it was discovered they were lying about the cause of a plane crash. You’re telling me none of the engineers who make a career out of investigating plane crashes and objectively reporting the facts was sufficiently pissed off at some cover-up order handed down by the mysterious “government” to run to the New York Times or the Washington Post and blow the whole thing wide open?
You’d have to include a factor for TWA’s perilous financial condition and its effect on their maintenance budget. Anything that wasn’t required by the manuals to be replaced, such as electrical parts with brittle and cracked insulation, would have been more likely than the global average to have been left alone instead.
It’s saddening that it’s been so long now since TWA800, which was hardly even the first such incident, and yet we *still * don’t have the fuel vapor explosivity issue closed out. The industry’s inherent cautious attitude can often be misplaced.