<_< ---- I know that's what the Fed's would like you to believe, but I don't buy it! For one Boeing doesn't gang (rout) fuel probe wiring through wire bundles with, or near, high tension wires for that specific reason!
Not true. (From the NTSB report)
Boeing’s PIs also indicated that the CWT FQIS wires were routed from the front of
the airplane to the CWT, VSO, totalizer, and the AIDS in and next to bundles carrying
numerous other power and signal wires. Although most airplane systems operated on
115-volt power, the Safety Board’s review of wiring in other airplanes indicated that the
FQIS and engine fuel flow wire bundles are routed near, and occasionally bundled with,
wires that provide 350-volt a.c. power to the cabin fluorescent lights.
>Second there would have to be not only a breakdown in insulation on both fuel prob wiring, and high tension >wiring, at the same place! At the same time! With the miles of wiring in that Aircraft, the odds on that are >almost nell!
Well I've seen, on MD80's, complete sections of wire bundles that look to have been vaporized. I've seen this, and repaired it, at least 3 times in my 22 years at AA. Something shorts, and the Kapton wire burns away about 18 inches of the wire bundle. 747 didn't use kapton, but still. If there is a short on one wire and it gets hot enough, it going to burn through other wires in the bundle. And lets face it, this wasn't a new airplane. It was 25 years old with 90,000 hours. I'm sure the wire didn't look like new. Also, listen to the CVR tapes. just 20 or 30 seconds before the explosion, the captain was commenting about the weird readings he was seeing on one of the fuel flow indicators. Guess what, the fuel flow wiring runs in the same bundle as the fqis wiring.
> Plus no sign of that was found on any of the recovered wiring, or fuel probs! ------- Also, if the Fed. really >believed that, don't you think that they'd ground the 747 fleet to at least inspect the wiring? Air Force 1 >included? No such order, or AD was issued! Again why? Inspection of wiring was ordered but only months >latter!-
There was signs of cracked insulation, arcing, improper splices, etc on much of the wiring found. Not on the fqis wiring, but they only found half of it. As to why they didn't order immediate inspection, they didn't have a theory as to the cause for quite some time. It took 10 months just to recover the wreckage
>------- As for the "overheated" pack theory, I don't buy it ether! ----- Flt.800, was almost a half hour into it's >flight. At what? Approx. 18,000 ft.? Traveling at what ground speed? 250mph? What temp. do you really feel >that pack would be? I've got friends that worked in Saudia Arabia where 747's have their Air Conditioning >packs ruining for hours, in the summer, on ramps in places like Jetta, where outside temperatures commonly >reach 120 degrees, without incident! No the overheated pack theory don't cut it either!
The packs didn't overheat, the packs get hot which heats the center fuel tank right above them. Since there was only a couple hundred pounds of fuel in there, the fuel gets hot causing evaporation and fuel vapors. The packs were on for 2.5 hours on the ground before pushback in the middle of summer. Then another half an hour for taxi to the runway. The plane lifted off at 2019 and exploded at 2031, 12 minutes. It exploded at 13,000 feet. They did a test with another 747 with temp sensors placed in the center tank. temp right before takeoff was 145 degrees and 125 degrees at 13,000 feet. The temp in the pack bay was about 200 degrees and pack surface temps up to 350 degrees before takeoff. The fuel flash point was tested at 116 degrees. They even used Greek fuel, since that was the type in the center tank
Read the final NTSB report which details things down to the molecular level. It is quite interesting, although at 350 pages the parts about the galley drain being clogged and other such non relevant things gets a bit long winded. Even they say that this is the most probable cause, and there is no conclusive proof. It seems to me that if they wanted to fake it, they could whip up a piece of wire with some cracked insulation and arcing on it and say, here's the proof. All of the conspiricy websites come up with a few irrigularities and everyone starts screaming. When an airplane explodes into a million pieces there will be irrigularities. Most if not all are addressed in the report. On the website you refer another poster to, the guy talks about some mechanic who was in on the investigation. Lets compare his expertise to the hundreds of engineers, scientists, computer simulations and millions of dollars spent investigating it. Also the website owner believes people and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time, so I kind of disregarded anything I read there.