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Fuel Tank Safety
Monday
July 16, 2001
Two hundred and thirty people died in 1996 when TWA flight 800 exploded just minutes after takeoff from Kennedy airport.
It took four long years for the National Transportation Safety Board to determine it was probably caused by a fuel tank explosion.
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Joe Lychner's wife Pam and his two young daughters died in the disaster. Now five years later, Lychner believes their lives could have been saved if the 747 had been equipped with a nitrogen inerting system; a foolproof way to keep airline fuel tanks from exploding. He blames the FAA.
He says, "They would rather just kill people and pay off the families in order to avoid having to go back and retrofit the entire fleet."
A fuel tank explodes when excessive heat raises the air and fuel temperature. Add a spark, and you've created a bomb in the belly of the plane. But to replace fuel systems would mean grounding planes and cost airlines hundreds of millions of dollars.
Aviation attorney Arthur Wolk says, “It's indefensible, to sentence another 3, 4, 5 or 600 people to death for a matter of money … If we have the means to fix the airplanes so that nobody dies, then it's incumbent upon us to do it."
“Extra's” travel detective Peter Greenberg says the FAA can't afford to wait. “Once you find out what the solution is, in my book if you don't implement the solution, that's criminal negligence."
The FAA refused an interview with “Extra,” but has taken some steps to fix the problem..
One of the FAA's safety suggestions is to just keep the fuel tanks at least partly full at all times. But most aviation experts agree all that will do is make an explosion on your plane "less likely."
And in May the FAA did order airplane manufacturers to
implement fuel tank maintenance and inspection programs.
Lychner says that's not good enough. "I guess the 230
people from TWA 800 weren't enough to make this
change."
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