TWA Flight 800 was just 16 minutes out of JFK Airport on a clear July night when a short circuit ignited the gasoline vapors in the center fuel tank, ripping the plane’s belly open and blowing off its nose and cockpit. Some of the passengers were sucked into the nighttime sky, 13,700 feet above the Atlantic Ocean. Most remained strapped in their seats as the 747—its fuselage opened to 300 mph winds—flew on for long seconds, before disintegrating and plunging into the sea. As a reporter for Newsday, I was among those who covered that catastrophe in 1996, and will never forget my interviews with family members whose children and husbands and grandparents were on that plane. I’m also still haunted by a colleague’s description of the hellish crash site: slicks of burning jet fuel on a black, heaving sea, with Coast Guard searchlights illuminating floating bodies, sundered suitcases, and a teddy bear.
So I took special interest last week when the Federal Aviation Administration announced, after a 12-year struggle with the airline industry, that it was ordering a retrofit of commercial planes to prevent fuel-tank explosions. The airlines will have to install in all new planes and in some of their old ones a new device that fills the center tanks with inert gas as they empty, so a spark can’t ignite them. The struggling airline industry gets nine more years to install the devices in just 55 percent of its planes, but is still not happy about the cost—from $90,000 to $300,000 per plane—and insists this is a classic case of government over-regulation. Fuel-tank explosions, the airlines say, are “a rare event.” Another Flight 800 is highly unlikely. In other words, it’s a risk the free market is willing to take. How about you?
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