John L. Perry
Thursday, Aug. 9, 2001

Every effort to challenge the feds' official line has been scoffed at or rejected out of hand. The government is especially jittery about considering evidence that the Boeing 747 jumbo jet may have been shot out of the sky off Long Island, N.Y., by missile fire.

But a serious chink in that stone wall is revealed deep down inside a report by a high-level industry-and-government panel released Wednesday.

While it focuses on multibillion-dollar costs of rendering fuel tanks explosion-proof, this report in effect blows a gaping hole in the government's pet theory.

Too Costly, but Why?

Commissioned by the Federal Aviation Administration, the report was supposed to evaluate proposals for preventing future fuel-tank explosions on commercial jetliners.

The upshot of that report is that the proposals – such as pumping inert gases into the tanks to prevent fuel fumes from being ignited by some electrical spark – are too expensive to be worth the costs, put at up to $12 billion for each option over 15 years.

But to arrive at a meaningful cost-risk ratio, scientists would have to calculate what the risk is in order to stack that up against the costs.

And what did they come up with as a risk measurement?

Scarcely a Chance in the World

The experts' answer: At the very worst, the likelihood of a fuel tank's exploding would be no more than one – just one – in the next 20 years for the hundreds upon hundreds of jetliners in service each of those 20 years all around the globe.

This report is the product of a yearlong study by 70 aviation authorities representing the FAA, airlines, pilots, European regulators and other pertinent groups.

Almost as if they could ignore the fact that 230 people perished in the fiery crash of TWA 800 in 1996 – caused, the federal government argues, by just such an accidental fuel-tank explosion – those experts concluded that it wasn't worth it to spend billions of dollars.

They neglected to stipulate what cost might not be too excessive to spare 230 lives.

But they did conclude the odds against another fuel tank's exploding were simply too overwhelming, the risk just too remote.

Too Unlikely to Consider

If that's the case, then the likelihood of TWA 800's being blown out of the sky by an accidentally exploding fuel tank is also too remote to be considered seriously.

Even the Wall Street Journal, preoccupied with the expense of rendering fuel tanks safe, buried the once-in-20-years angle in the next-to-last paragraph of its story. Nor did it even come close to making the obvious connection.

It will not be alone in missing the larger story.

This bit of reality is not apt to be spotted, let alone seized upon and two and two put together, by the conventional news media, which have rushed to embrace without question the government's miraculous exploding-tank theory.

What this FAA experts' report does, though, is to: