Twa 800

[blues deville]

Back in the news. Well.....Fox news.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/06/18/twa-flight-800-investigators-break-silence-in-new-documentary-claim-original/

I've never agreed with the investigators conclusion of a center fuel tank explosion. It's all low voltage wiring and if it was an issue, why weren't old Boeing's blowing up all over the place. I know of an ALPA safety officer who visited the wreckage in Long Island, NY. He was an ex-US Air Force pilot with lots of experience with weapons such as missiles. His description of the fuselage..... "A missile went through this airplane. Period". He mentioned clearly seeing an entry and exit point. Also, a heat seeking missile would find this part of the airplane first.

I think there is much more to this story but we may never find the truth.

[J.O.]

There may be more to the story but I never understood the logic behind wanting to cover up a terrorist attack, especially in a country whose leaders feel the need to wave the flag of superiority at every opportunity. An accidental launch of an American missile though, that would be another story altogether.

Nelson DeMille wrote a novel called Night Fall in 2004. It tied the downing of TWA800 by a missile and 9/11 together (loosely). It's a pretty good read but total fiction.

[W5]

It will be shown on the EPIX Cable Channel on July 17, 2013.

[Say Again, Over!]

blues deville,

I'll confess I'm not an expert in the matter but I'm pretty sure a heat-seeker would definitely go for one of the engines, especially on the climb out as they are throwing out lots of heat. I see no reason why the underbelly of the airplane would be hotter than an engine, although that would be reason enough to blow up on its own... Things would be different with radar guided missiles, though, as they center on the mass of the return.

Further, a missile is not a projectile per say. It's an "explosives delivery device". There's a prox sensor that makes it blow up when it's at a point close enough to its target, lest it be rendered inoperative by its impact. You might certainly find an "entry" point where it blew up but an "exit" point is more doubtful as it's not a bullet making its way in and out of the airplane. Once it blew on one side, it was all bits and pieces.

Slightly educated post. I might be waaaaayyy off. Let's see what someone else says.

Felix

[blues deville]

Interesting post and I am sure your information is accurate. I don't which would be a hotter either. Packs or engine exhaust. I do know when you do a walk around by a pack exhaust on a hot summer day it can feel like a blow torch. Those things get hot and the unit might cover a bigger area than the high bypass engine.

The missile part is beyond my personal knowledge but I still think all 1980's Boeing products would be exploding on a daily basis if this was a electrical problem in the center fuel tanks of their aircraft.

[J.O.]

From what little I now about heat seeking missiles, the way TWA800 exploded could have been caused by one, depending on the proximity settings on the missile warhead. Whether I actually buy that theory is another story.

[Mitch Cronin]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaKGQWcN2wc

New documentary, in 12 parts available there. [There are 12, but the first 10 seem to finish this "rough cut"]

Some of it is fluff, but there's some very interesting, and I think, somewhat compelling, stuff as well. The "new evidence" we've heard of, is that there were radar traces of material originating from the point where it exploded, travelling perpendicular to the flight path, at very high velocity. (a fuel explosion would be considered a"low velocity" explosion) Also the left wing top surface was fractured into several small pieces, and this type of fracturing was demonstrated to be related to hydraulic forces resulting from a high velocity explosion...

From what I know of aircraft and their innards:

The original conclusion always had me baffled as to how the center wing tank could have exploded.... - at all!... but then - while leaving an intact wing -- which depends on that structure to remain intact -- to carry an aircraft without it's nose section up an additional two thousand feet??? (ostensibly having ignored basic laws of aerodynamics and not stalled when it pitched up violently)

IOW, I could never buy that conclusion. ....even before we started carrying out AD's that came about because of that conclusion... none of which could ever explain to me how a spark inside a wet fuel tank could ignite the over-rich mixture! ...because;

From what I know about jet fuel:

If you drop a flaming match into a puddle of fuel on the ground, you can make it ignite, however if you drop a flaming match into a puddle of fuel in the bottom of an open bucket, the match will be extinguished - I've done that. Even just the walls of the bucket are enough to allow the fuel vapour to become too rich to ignite... The fuel tank was closed, so the fuel/air vapour mixture would have been much richer.

Additionally... I've always been disturbed by the lack of credibility accounted to the huge number of eye witnesses who saw something streaking toward the aircraft before seeing the thing explode and fall to the ocean.

Edited to add: Then again, I fall for stupid s#!t all the time.... and, I often think I know things only to find later that I know nothing.

[boestar]

Mitch:

Eye witnesses are notoriously unreliable with occurrences such as this. Just look at the eye witness statements from last weeks SFO crash. The final video did not show ANY of what was described by the Eye witnesses. Some of that is lack of a decent description of what they saw. some is a total misunderstanding of what they saw and some is complete embellishment of what they saw. Unless witnessed by an observer who can understand what is happening the descriptions will almost always be off.

I agree with your observations of fuel in the tanks. Whenever we enter the tanks we must measure the VOCs in the tank and never have I opened and empty tank and found a mixture conducive to causing a fire let alone an explosion. Some other failure would have needed to happen first to allow oxygen into the mixture and cause an explosion. We just don't know what that failure was.