AIUI....Kallstrom is the guy who said the airline jet shot down by a missile over Long Island, was actually downed when the center fuel tank exploded. I never knew Jet-A would explode. In Japan we heated quonset huts with Jet-A. You could barely light it with a match.
Kallstrom has this backwards. There are a very few good people in the FBI, not most or even many. He left the FBI when Bill Clinton was finishing up his presidency. I doubt Kallstrom is in the loop with today’s rank-and-file agents.
Yep! Kerosene.
Jet-A (kerosene) has a much lower vapor pressure than gasoline, making it harder to light with a match. However, this lower vapor pressure means that gasoline in an enclosed space (fuel tank) will evaporate to the point of the vapor/air mix is too rich to explode (not stoichiometric).
Conversely, a tank containing Jet-A with its lower vapor pressure will have a much leaner vapor/air mix which is more likely to be close to stoichiometric, i.e. explosive.
Back in the 1970's before the USMC had either fuel drop tanks or refueling probes on their CH-53D Sikorsky Sea Stallions, their range was about 200 nautical miles or so. We were testing to see if we could fly them to Europe to support NATO. Obviously, a 200 mile range was not going to get it done. Our longest leg was from the east coast of Greenland to Iceland, a bit over 750 n.m. We needed internal ferry tanks.
There were 500 gallon fiberglass palletized ferry tanks in the system, but we needed special permission from NAVAIR to use them. Why, we asked?
It turned out that several years earlier a CH-53D was flying with one of these ferry tanks. Sometime during the flight (it was assumed), the failure/inaccuracy of the fuel quantity gauge for the ferry tank caused the crew chief to open the filler cap to visually check the fuel level. Static electricity was believed to have ignited the vapor/air mix over the fuel in that tank. The resultant explosion destroyed the helo and all aboard.
After setting up training classes on the danger of improper use of these ferry tanks, we were given permission to use three per aircraft (1,500 gallons JP-5/Jet-A) when we tested the US-Europe flight distances over warm water. We flew a flight of 6 CH-53D helos from MCAS New River, NC to Homestead AFB, FL, 753nm. The next day we flew Homestead to Grand Turk Island. The following day we flew to Roosevelt Roads Naval Base, Puerto Rico. After two weeks supporting an artillery battalion on Vieques, we flew home.