AIR CRASH RESCUE NEWS:
>
> June 11, 2002 - New Interest in Taiwan Crash, May be similar to Flight 800
>
> NEW YORK (USA) - It happened half a world away. A Boeing 747 exploded in
> midair 20 minutes after taking off in Taipei, Taiwan, killing all 225 aboard.
> In the United States, there was the usual flurry of news stories but little
> sustained interest in a crash that did not involve U.S. passengers.
>
> But the aviation industry and federal safety officials are paying close
> attention to the May 25 crash of China Airlines Flight 611. It's too early to
> tell why the 23-year-old plane broke apart with no warning. The circumstances
> have raised the possibility that the culprit could have been the same design
> flaw that brought down TWA Flight 800 six years ago.
>
> "Everybody's watching this one," said Robert Clodfelter, an explosions expert
> and consultant in Dayton, Ohio.
>
> It will be weeks or months before investigators will be able to tell if the
> center fuel tank exploded on the China Airlines plane as it did on the TWA
> plane, also a Boeing 747. All that is known of the China Airlines flight is
> that the plane took off at 3:08 p.m., climbed to more than 30,000 feet and
> disappeared from radar at 3:28. There were no distress calls. Military radar
> recorded the aircraft breaking into four distinct pieces.
>
> The two black boxes that record flight data and cockpit conversations have
> not yet been recovered. And most of the wreckage still lies beneath more than
> 130 feet of water in the Taiwan Strait between Taiwan and mainland China.
> Investigators won't know more until the boxes and the wreckage are retrieved.
>
> In addition to the fuel tank scenario, investigators will be looking into
> several possibilities: a catastrophic structural failure, the failure of a
> door locking mechanism, or a bomb.
>
> Authorities with the Taiwan government, which is leading the crash inves-
> tigation, earlier made statements that atmospheric conditions at 30,000 feet
> would make a fuel tank explosion impossible. But experts say that's not
> correct.
>
> "I'm sitting here looking at the data," said Joe Shepherd, professor of
> aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology, noting that the
> federal government and the industry have known for more than 30 years that an
> explosion could take place at high altitudes. Shepherd studied fuel-air
> explosions for the National Transportation Safety Board after the Flight 800
> crash.
>
> On the ground, air conditioning packs beneath the fuel tanks of the 747 and
> other Boeing jets can heat up the fuel vapors in a nearly empty center tank
> to the flammable state. When the plane takes off and climbs, the pressure
> decreases and with that the temperature range at which the vapors are
> flammable decreases as well. At the same time, the tank is cooling as the
> aircraft climbs into the colder air of the upper atmosphere. As the
> temperature decreases, along with the pressure, the vapors can remain
> flammable until sometime during the cruise portion of the flight when the
> tank becomes too cold.
>
> Once the vapors ignite, an explosion of the tank is inevitable. And the tank,
> located between the wings, is a major structural part of the aircraft.
>
> The Federal Aviation Administration has issued dozens of orders to airlines
> to make fixes to prevent the ignition of the vapors. But the NTSB believes
> that it's impossible to identify all the ignition sources and that the only
> real fix will come with preventing the buildup of flammable vapors.
>
> The FAA and the aviation industry have predicted between two and three fuel
> tank explosions in a 10-year period. Last year, the center fuel tank of a
> Thai Airways Boeing 737 - which has a similar tank design to the 747 -
> exploded while the plane was on the tarmac in Bangkok.
>
> The safety board sent a five-person team to aid the investigation. Boeing
> sent three investigators to the scene and will send more when the wreckage is
> retrieved.
>
> "We're holding back the main team until we know what we're looking at," said
> Boeing spokeswoman Liz Verdier. "We need to find out the answer and see if
> it's something that needs to be changed."
>
> In March, an industry group that advises the FAA told the agency that methods
> to prevent flammable vapors in fuel tanks are effective but too expensive to
> justify. The FAA is continuing to study ways to put nitrogen in fuel tanks to
> keep the vapors from igniting.
>
> "With all the work the industry did ... we still don't know that anything
> they've done will prevent another fuel tank explosion," said Kevin Darcy, a
> former accident investigator for Boeing who worked on the Flight 800 probe.
> "I'd be a little bit anxious if I were Boeing or the FAA."

Barbara.... I hope that you do not object to my copying this and posting it on the other aviation board. There have been several questions raised over there regarding this, and I have been of the opinion that it would be an unlikely event..Evidently, I was incorrect. Thank you.

Hi Cecil! I don't mind at all. I've certainly gotten some valuable information from that site!

Barbara