Posted on 06/14/2016 4:25:56 PM PDT by Kaslin
The NTSB was SO concerned about this that they waited until 2008, twelve years after the TWA-800 disaster, eight years after they made their conclusion of its cause, to release their final directive on fuel tank inerting. . . and then only required retro-fitting the existing fleet by 2018! In addition, they only identified 60 out of over 1500 or so 747s among the aircraft to even be retrofitted! What’s wrong with this picture, if it was such a dangerous condition and design as they claimed?
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First of all, the FAA issued other directives to make fuel tanks safer before they got to inerting. The reason they waited was because in the late 1990’s the only inerting systems known were those used by the military, and they were too heavy and too expensive. Then there was an innovation that made inerting much less expensive and didn’t weigh as much. It’s very good, but not quite as good as the military’s. I think Boeing now puts it on all their new aircraft. The 787 for sure.
Good gosh, it’s going to be a ridiculous four weeks leading up to the anniversary.
The other directives were things that were already being done on the Boeing aircraft such as no electrical fuel gauge sensors. The important one they were fixating on was inerting the atmosphere.
Since 2010 ALL new major aircraft must have the inerted atmosphere fuel tanks.
I never said that. If you had any idea of how much visibility a live fire exercise has, you'd know that there is no way it was an accident during a LFE. If an officer on a Navy ship shot down an airliner in US air space, he'd be arrested even on the spot, even if he was the captain.
True. About two to three weeks before the TWA-800 disaster, a fully loaded and ready tripod mounted missile was discovered by a county sheriff's unit set up on a dirt road about four miles from the airport that TWA-800 took off from. It was armed and ready to go. It had a missile in the launcher, ready to go. . . Just no one there to launch it.
They explain it away. . . by giving no explanation of where it came from or why it was there. I guess it was just road-side litter. Such a launcher missile combination was easily worth over a million dollars on the underground market at the time, but it was abandoned on the road-side for some unknown reason.
As for using a radar to ping the plane, such a guidance would have lit up every receiving radar antenna in the area while it was doing it. . . and the number of return pings from TWA-800 would have been a dead giveaway that something was up. Instead we have only the official return pings from the transponder ever 4.64 seconds.
They explain it away. . . by giving no explanation of where it came from or why it was there. I guess it was just road-side litter. Such a launcher missile combination was easily worth over a million dollars on the underground market at the time, but it was abandoned on the road-side for some unknown reason.
I have not heard of this. Perhaps this was an earlier attempt which was discovered and aborted?
As for using a radar to ping the plane, such a guidance would have lit up every receiving radar antenna in the area while it was doing it. . . and the number of return pings from TWA-800 would have been a dead giveaway that something was up. Instead we have only the official return pings from the transponder ever 4.64 seconds.
I do not know if any shore equipment would have recorded excessive pings, or even if it did, that we would necessarily hear the truth about it. Nor do I know even if such a tactic might have been employed.
But even if they were using active microwave pinging to lock a missile onto an aircraft, it can be very directional. It may only be detectable in the cone of it's emission, and anyone not directly in line with it wouldn't see the queries. They might see the responses, but not the signal that was initiating them.
But again, I don't know if any such system was used. Perhaps they used a passive system to detect the approach of the aircraft so as to time their launch.
Even if the plane's transponder was used to get a general lock, I expect the final tracking would have been the regular heat seeking method anyway.
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