Well, I'm a little biased based on location, that being said
TWA Flight 800 still has me scratching my head, I don't know what to believe anymore
Sad that we may never know the full truth
AA Flight 587 seems like the in air equivalent of lift-off oversteer, on something with a twitchy rear end
A sad loss of life nonetheless
My father worked for Pan Am at JFK during Flight 103, he has a special distain for the media and how they treat people in a crisis because of it
Concorde is just plain sad from a technical angle, that we had the ability to go that far that fast, but we had to shelve it for reasons
The full truth is known.
TWA 800, straight up, was a Center Fuel tank explosion. Conspiracy theorists love that crash, but there’s no evidence to suggest anything beyond the simple explanation, it blew up from a center fuel tank explosion. People find the idea that something just blew unsettling, but that’s what happened.
Run the AC packs on the ground for a long time, on a hot summer day with a long taxi out, and you will heat up the tank right above them to over 100C, let the empty tank build up volatile fumes, with atmospheric oxygen present, and then introduce spark via failed wiring and shorted sensors, boom.
All Boeing airplanes now have nitrogen gas generators to vent the center tanks. This keeps the oxygen in the tank to a minimum. Even our 28 year old 757s have the nitrogen system retrofitted. The AC packs on those airplanes sit right under the center tank and yes, they get quite hot on a summer day.
Further, 747 fuel management procedures were changed as a result of TWA 800. All 747s had to be inspected. What we found two decades ago was shocking.
We found that all of our 747s had failed thrust bearings in the Center tank pumps, allowing the impeller to grind itself into the pump housing, and those pumps would heat up to over 150C if run dry in that Center tank...a result of the friction heat from that grinding when fuel wasn’t cooling them.
Super hot pump in empty tank full of hot fuel vapor, day in and day out, it’s a wonder we didn’t have any issues.
Until we got new pumps, with improved thrust bearings, the pumps had to be kept cool by leaving 5,000# of unusable fuel in the center tank. The engine fuel filters filled up with aluminum shavings from the impeller grinding away the housing, while we were waiting on new pumps, but the airplanes were OK.
AA 587 was a shocking bit of pilot error that resulted in the industry retraining pilots on how to manage roll, flight controls, and extreme flight conditions The FO snapped the tail off the airplane by going full deflection on the rudder and slamming it back and forth.
The rudder is designed for a steady full control deflection. Going immediate, opposite direction introduces loads far in excess of design/certification load. You’re adding the side slip load already present, and the rudder deflection load, which is increased due to side slip, and the net result is much more load than it was ever designed to handle.
The AA training program (Known, at the time as advanced maneuvers, IIRC) for upset recovery had emphasized the use of rudder as roll control and made no mention of avoiding sequential, opposite control inputs. The FO may, as a result of that training, have believed that he could slam the rudder back and forth with impunity.
Current upset recovery training emphasizes AOA control and specifically cautions against excessive rudder use.
