Robert Davey: Film would deconstruct what really happened to TWA Flight 800
Wreckage of TWA 800 being reconstructed at Calverton Executive Airpark, in Riverhead, New York, by the National Transportation Safety Board in May 1997
Flight path of TWA 800. The colored rectangles are areas from which wreckage was recovered.
BRIDGEPORT, Conn.
What would a documentary film about the crash of TWA Flight 800 look like? For more than six years I have been a member of a group of four journalists at a series of meetings (paused by the pandemic) to try to raise something over $1 million to make what we intend will be the definitive account of what really destroyed a 25-year-old Boeing 747-100 and killed its total of 230 passengers and crew, only 12 or so minutes after leaving Kennedy International Airport, in New York City, on an overnight flight to Paris on July 17, 1996. This year marks 25 years since the crash.
Our group is rich in experience. Three are veterans of TV news, while I owe my place on the team to my work reporting on the story for the Village Voice in the late 90s and early aughts. After three years, we were joined by physicist Tom Stalcup, whose own documentary film on the crash, TWA Flight 800, released in 2013, received favorable reviews. That film, directed by former CBS journalist Kristina Borjesson, raised questions about the official conclusion of the National Transportation Safety Board that an electrical fault produced a spark that ignited fuel vapors in the airplane’s almost empty center fuel tank. Tom was keen to join us and help make a second film that would finish the job.
Our film will show that the huge, gentle beast that was that 747, tail number N93119, was perfectly safe, with no hitherto unsuspected ignition sources lurking within its complex systems and miles of wiring.
As part of that effort I am looking forward to being able to demonstrate that the NTSB falsely insinuated that a tiny amount of liquid Jet A kerosene fuel—too little to register on the aircraft’s fuel gauges—could have evaporated inside a vast tank with a capacity of just under 13,000 gallons and then exploded with such force that the 400,000-pound aircraft disintegrated within seconds.
Government research into the flammability of hydrocarbon fuels and gases goes back to work done by the U.S. Bureau of Mines in the 1950s, and continued in the following decades with reports produced by the Navy and Air Force and Federal Aviation Administration. These reports explain that if there is too little fuel vapor per unit volume of air, the mixture will be too lean to burn, and if there is too much, it will be too rich to burn.
In our film it will be satisfying to be able to report that, for example, NTSB investigators were able to ignite a warm mixture of Jet A fuel vapor and air equivalent to what they estimated was contained within TWA 800’s center tank at about 13,700 feet, but only with a spark produced by a current far stronger than any on the 747. Even then, ignition only lasted for a brief moment. A mixture is not technically flammable unless it will burn independently of the ignition source, yet the NTSB’s tests never showed that this was possible with the vapor mixture investigators tested.
For most of its ignition experiments, the NTSB used small laboratory flasks, but the largest-scale and most spectacular of the tests that it showed the public was conducted in what it called a “quarter-scale” tank.
The safety board did not explain for reporters and family members that while its quarter-scale tank had dimensions a quarter of the size of the dimensions of TWA 800’s center fuel tank, its volume was really only one 64th the volume of a full-sized tank, about 200 gallons, although it acknowledged this size difference in a footnote of its report.
Size evidently matters when a mixture of fuel vapor and air is ignited, since some of the military research into fuel flammability established that the larger the container, the smaller the force produced when the military equivalent of Jet A vapor explodes.
The quarter-scale tests were no match for TWA 800’s center tank, which was 64 times larger. But apart from that, the NTSB used in its quarter-scale tests not Jet A vapor, but a mixture of propane and hydrogen and air, and an ignition source much more powerful than any that existed, even as a remote possibility, on any 747.
Yet investigators never demonstrated that the mixture’s explosive characteristics matched those of Jet A, at any altitude. Hydrogen, after all, is highly flammable, and propane is considered so dangerous that supermarkets bar customers from bringing even empty canisters inside the store.
On that question, I’d like to include a comment from a professor at Leeds University, in England, John Griffiths, co-author of Flame and Combustion (Blackie Academic and Professional, Third ed., 1995), who told me, after reviewing a description of the quarter-scale tests, that as the ignited mixture of propane and hydrogen and air encountered structural panels inside the tank, it became “turbulent,” a technical term meaning more rapid and violent. He said he’d be “astonished” if the ignition of a mixture of Jet A vapor and air would have developed in a comparable way.
And I would like our film to make public an incident that occurred in 1995, a little more than a year before its final flight, when N93119 was approaching Rome and was twice struck by lightning. The flight engineer told me the story, and he also showed me a photograph of the airplane after it landed safely at Rome, with its right-wing tip damaged by the lightning strikes. The tail number is clearly visible in the photo. He told me the lightning had charred wiring near the wing fuel tanks on that side. Yet no fire and explosion had happened, and the 747 had landed safely. I looked up the NTSB’s TWA 800 maintenance report, but I could not find any record of the lightning incident and the repairs to the wing, which were visible in a July 29, 1996, Time magazine cover photo of floating debris. Yet a Boeing spokesman told me that the information had been shared with the NTSB.
In a way, the 1995 incident was a bookend to another incident at Rome, in 1964, one that did not end so well, when another TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 707, struck a steamroller on the tarmac as the pilot was attempting to abort his takeoff after an engine failed. A flame traveled down the wing and into the center fuel tank, which exploded into a horrific fire. A total of 51 people were killed and another 23 injured.
The captain of the plane, Vernon William Lowell, wrote a book — Airline Safety Is a Myth — in which he blamed the disaster on the flammable fuel vapor in his almost-empty center tank—a situation uncannily similar to the NTSB’s probable cause for the 1996 TWA 800 explosion, except for the fact that the fuel in his tank was a fuel known as JP-4, a petroleum-derived mixture that was far more volatile than Jet A kerosene. He says that most airlines were already voluntarily switching to Jet A fuel, for safety’s sake, and wonders what was holding the FAA back from banning JP-4, also known as Jet B.
The NTSB, at a session on fuel flammability at its December 1997 TWA Flight 800 hearings, in Baltimore, for some reason never mentioned the earlier TWA 800, but instead focused on the case of PanAm Flight 214, a Boeing 707 that crashed in Elkton, Md., in December 1963 after lightning struck its left wing, a fuel tank containing a mixture of Jet A and Jet B exploded, and the wing fell off.
Lowell, the captain of the 1964 TWA 800, points to partially filled or empty fuel tanks as an unacceptable hazard because the fuel vapor that fills them is flammable. That’s very similar to the NTSB’s message at Baltimore.
Yet, assuming that the safety board was aware of the 1995 lightning incident, someone at Baltimore might have pointed out that N93119, fueled by Jet A kerosene, survived those two mega-voltage jolts with flying colors; but that would not have helped the NTSB’s argument that there had been no improvements in fuel-tank safety since PanAm 214, and that only now, with the TWA 800 crash, were investigators facing up to the dangerously explosive conditions in aircraft fuel tanks that threatened every passenger and crew member.
In an FAA database of fuel-tank explosions, there are none, before TWA Flight 800 (1996), in which a plane crashed because an electric spark produced by the aircraft’s own systems ignited an explosion in a fuel tank containing only Jet A kerosene.
I hope that we meet someone interested in funding our film soon.
Robert Davey is a Bridgeport-based journalist. See: www.robertdavey.com or www.seedyhack. com
His email is rj_davey@me.com