Are we any safer?

Some feel more needs to be done to prevent another tragedy

BY SYLVIA ADCOCK | SPECIAL TO NEWSDAY

Government safety efforts during the last decade have done little to prevent an explosion similar to the one that brought down TWA Flight 800, and fuel tank designs on commercial jets still fall short of the U.S. government's own safety goals, a prestigious lab recently concluded.

The report by Sandia National Laboratories -- whose experts are in charge of safeguarding the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons -- found that most fuel tank explosions, while rare, could not be eliminated under current regulations.

"We felt like, with all the work done, it's still not adequate," said John Hickey, director of aircraft certification for the Federal Aviation Administration, which commissioned the Sandia study. Current regulations "still leave us far short of the goal."

But while the FAA has used the Sandia conclusions to bolster its argument that airlines need to install a system designed to eliminate flammable vapors, it hasn't been done. Years of lobbying, coupled with a slow-moving bureaucracy, have combined to prevent the FAA from enforcing such a safety measure.

Even now, as the agency appears poised to require the system on all commercial jets, the airlines say it is too costly and unnecessary. If forced to comply, they want 10 years to do so instead of the proposed seven. Industry groups say Sandia's conclusions are exaggerated.

Rep. Tim Bishop, (D-Southampton) has called for Congressional hearings on the delays. "Ten years after the Flight 800 disaster, the FAA still has not fixed the problem. That is unacceptable to me and should be to my colleagues as well," Bishop said in a prepared statement.

The Sandia findings are in sharp contrast to a report from an airline industry team assembled several years ago, which concluded that the FAA's efforts to date to increase fuel tank safety had decreased the likelihood of another explosion by 75 percent. Those efforts have been centered only on eliminating the source of sparks that could trigger an explosion of the tank.

The Sandia report found that effort was "mostly unproductive due to the eventual inability to eliminate all ignition sources." Only by eliminating the flammability of fuel tanks can the risk of another disaster be wiped out, it said.

Currently, fuel tanks on the worldwide fleet of commercial jets are potentially flammable approximately 30 percent of the time. Much of this danger occurs in the first 30 minutes after takeoff, and it's more likely that the tanks are flammable on warm days when air conditioning packs located beneath the tanks heat up the vapors. A spark could then ignite the vapors, causing an explosion.

That's what happened with Flight 800, investigators said. The jet exploded on a warm summer evening after the jet had been delayed at the gate, its air conditioning packs running to cool the passengers inside the cabin.

The FAA, the federal agency charged with air safety regulations, in November proposed the rule to require airlines to retrofit their fleets with systems such as the one that would replace oxygen in the tank with nitrogen, which cannot ignite.

Bernard Loeb, the often-outspoken aviation safety chief at the National Transportation Safety Board during the four-year Flight 800 investigation, said he is surprised that there has been no final action on the flammability issue by now.

"It was clearly a major accident of significant proportions . . . Look at the length of time invested, the number of people that were on it. There was all kinds of gnashing of teeth. But 10 years after accident, the primary issue, the permitting of flammable vapors in fuel tanks, has not been solved."

Boeing has already designed a system to replace oxygen with nitrogen, and is using it on four planes in its fleet. The company, in a prepared statement, said it is "a strong advocate of fuel tank safety. Industry standards for ignition prevention have always been the basis of our designs. We continue to implement safety enhancements in all of our models."

Before the TWA crash, airplane manufacturers said flammable fuel tanks would not have to be eliminated because engineers had ensured that there was no way for a spark to get into the tank to ignite vapors.

But 17 fuel tank explosions in the past 40 years, including Flight 800 and a Thai Airways runway explosion in 2001, proved that premise to be faulty. And the FAA says it has discovered scores of ways for electrical sparks to get into the tanks. "We were really stunned," Hickey said. "And I think it shocked the designers who believed they had engineered out the ignition sources."

In the case of Flight 800, the source of the spark was believed to be damaged wiring leading to fuel probes inside the tank, which tell the pilots how much fuel is left.

In the past 10 years, two industry-dominated advisory commissions concluded that the number of lives saved would not justify the cost of retrofitting the fleet. Airlines say the pricetag, $313 million to outfit the current fleet, is out of their reach.

In a 165-page filing to the FAA, the powerful Air Transport Association, which represents major airlines, said the systems are unnecessary and that new measures to prevent electrical sparks were sufficient to prevent another catastrophe like Flight 800. The Sandia report overstated the risk of another fuel tank explosion, the ATA said, with a "fatally flawed" safety analysis.

"Airlines are in the safety business and cannot afford another accident like TWA 800," said Basil Baremo, the ATA's vice president for safety. "If it makes sense to do it, the airlines will do it."

Dozens of new directives -- such as orders to replace pumps, inspect wiring, or add new protections -- "have positively affected transport safety, yet unsafe conditions remain that need to be addressed," the Sandia report says.

The Sandia experts said current fuel tank designs, even with recent efforts to improve safety, put the chances of a fuel tank explosion at between one in a million flight hours and one in 10 million flight hours. The FAA's own guidelines call for new commercial jets to be designed with a risk of only one catastrophic event in the lifetime of an airplane model -- one accident in a billion flight hours.

Besides improving the fuel tank design, the NTSB believes that the government should also explore using inerting systems in cargo holds because hazardous shipments can cause in-flight fires. A cargo fire caused by a lithium battery explosion was the subject of an NTSB hearing last week. The NTSB also believes the technology should be considered for preventing damage from some types of terrorist attacks, including missile attacks and whether and when the FAA's proposal will become a mandate is yet to be seen.

The agency agreed, at the request of the airlines, to extend the public comment period on the proposal, which effectively delays any rule. The FAA has 16 months after the closing of the public comment period, which came in May, to come up with a final rule -- but its lawyers and specialists must first address and consider every point made in thousands of pages of comments from the industry, including the one filed by the ATA.

In the meantime, NTSB investigators are looking into a reported explosion of a wing tank of a Boeing 727 during ground maintenance in Bangledore, India.

There were no injuries, but the NTSB believes that if the explosion had occurred in-flight, lives would have been lost.

As for the legacy of Flight 800, Loeb said he isn't sure there is one -- yet.

"If they really do declare and demonstrate that flammable fuel tanks is a flawed concept, then that is a legacy." The idea, he said that engineers believed they could eliminate all ignition sources, "is just arrogance . . . When you have a critical flight system you need redundancy."