hey,

Recently, i have been watching a lot of documentaries about aviation and one thing i have noticed is that there is ALWAYS a part where they have to talk about TWA flight 800 so my question is, why is this specific crash so important? how come they never talk about any other accident?

i dont really know how to fully answer your question but from what ive gathered from watching documentarys about the crash. i think its that they discovered that there are many faults with how the 747 (not sure about toher aircraft) was design some that pop to my head that the low voltage wire that go through the fuel tanks where bundled next to each other in other parts of the aircraft, and that the airconditioning generators where places next to the fuel tanks which heated the tanks up as the aircraft was on the tarmac because of delay for a few hours with the aircon on. also they found out that jetfuel is flameable when it is heated to a vapour which happened on twa800 (but when a liquid its not), so this made new light on aircraft design to manufacturers.

i hope this helped
if u need more info on twa800 just ask

Dan

You mean "explosive" in vapour form (it "burns" quite well in liquid form) - given the right concentration of air-fuel (same principle as the "air-fuel bomb", BTW) - but aside from that - the issue was actually about chafing of wires against themselves and against the tube (inside a metal tube) and after the wearing away of the insulation, the resultant repeated arcing to that very tube followed by an erosion of the tube wall, then exposure of the arc to the air/fuel mixture. It's not quite as "simple" as you make it sound. It's one of those "HUH? We never thought of that!" issues (in theory, it doesn't happen, but proof positive again that Murphy is right). (Murphy's Law - "If anything can go wrong, it will, at the most inoportune time, with the worst possible consequences" - this mixes the law and a couple of corollaries as well)

As to WHY TWA800 is "important" - it represented an achievement of forensic aircraft accident investigation. Given enough parts, the cause of the crash can be determined and future similar incidents prevented

hey,

thanks for the replies but i was watching something about flightdeck's the other day and they mentioned the TWA 800 crash and another time where they were talking about landing gear...why not the Jetblue thing instead, i mean it has more to do with landing gear than TWA 800

I think one of the main reasons it gets so much coverage is because of the conspiracy theorists that suspect that this plane was shot down either on purpose to avert a terrorist attack or by an accidental surface to air test missile. Since these theorys got so much publicity, many reports have been done to disprove this/

I always figured this to be the case.

yes TWA 800 happened at the worst time for the company, I think that that accident was the ultimate down fall of TWA before that they posted a profit, they had 20 757's on order and 15 MD83's on order which they still took delivery of, but they still had a decent international network, and their passenger numbers were on a rise, after that their international route network and passenger numbers started to shrink and then in 2001 they were no more. I always wondered, if that accident never happened if TWA would still be here today.