Gary, on a flight I was on last night we had a malfunction that kicked off the autopilot (among other things) without notice. There happened to be four highly qualified (OK, 3 and me) MD-11 pilots on board. We all sat in the cockpit and pulled out all the manuals and discussed what we thought the cause might be and how we could work around it. We even consulted with maintenance specialists on the ground. But none of us could figure what had happened or how we could work around it. Then, on 10 mile final, the problem fixed itself. What's that prove? It proves that things happen in airplanes that cannot always be explained by the folks who are supposedly experts in that airplane. And that was a relatively minor and not totally uncommon problem. How many of those 39 retired 747 captains had any experience whatsoever with explosions in airline fuel tanks? How many of them studied all the evidence, with the full cooperation of the engineers who actually designed the aircraft they were looking at? Among the guys I fly with, I could probably find a significant number who believe just about anything. That doesn't mean what they believe is true.
Rokke, I just talked to Mike who did crash investigations at one time. He said you might want to check on the Iranian 747, because if he recalls correctly it was struck by lighning during an approach to either Madrid or Barcelona in Spain.