Friday marks thirty years since a TWA flight from New York to Paris exploded after takeoff from John F. Kennedy Airport, killing everyone on board. With hindsight, we can see this was the disaster that predicted more Boeing design flaws, more accidents and more lives lost and by that I refer to the Boeing 737, 737NG, 737 Max and 787 Dreamliner.

On July 17, 1996, a TWA Boeing 747 was split in two by a blast in its center fuel tank. It jettisoned the front of the airplane downward into the Atlantic, and tipped the aft end upward where its wings broke off in ascent, spewing clouds of fuel droplets that promptly erupted in flames.

An exhaustive investigation concluded that Boeing’s fuel tank design, which used the gas to absorb heat from air conditioning equipment below, made the center tank volatile 30 percent of the time. And while that seemed to surprise a lot of people after the crash, Boeing was aware of the hazard going back to the design of the 747 in the sixties, but decided it could work around it. It was wrong. (A detailed list of fuel tank explosions on Boeing aircraft follows this post.)

So now you are asking what that has to do with the Boeing 737 rudder design, a contributing factor to two deadly crashes in 1991 and 1994, before TWA even happened? And why, for heaven’s sake would I compare Flight 800 to the software design on the 737 Max that led to twin disasters in 2018 and 2019? And what could possibly link 787 Dreamliner battery and assembly problems to TWA?

ANA Flight 692 after its emergency landing. Kenichi Kawamura photo

What I will tell you is that those crises and others at Boeing demonstrate a company that has repeatedly put airplanes into the air without fully understanding inherent hazards. Or worse, understanding the risks but playing the odds. This tendency was frequently seen during the Flight 800 investigation. And we saw it again with the crashes of the 737 Max as I explain in the updated version of my book, Deadly Departure, soon to be available as an audiobook.

Lion Air Flight 610 plunged nose first into the Java Sea in October 2018, killing all 189 people on board. Boeing quickly determined that a faulty flight sensor triggered the nose of the 737 Max to pitch down. A software system had been installed on this, the newest iteration of the sixties era jetliner. The software, known by the acronym MCAS, could seize control from the pilots and send the airplane into a dive. But the existence of MCAS was not shared with the pilots or the airlines who bought the airplane.

The Lion Air cockpit crew wrestled with their unseen enemy, gaining then losing altitude as the software triggered again and again. It fired 26 times before the tragic conclusion.

Nine days after the crash, 737 Max operators were informed about the software in an emergency notice. Boeing arranged for what pilots told me was a highly unusual in-person meeting where the representatives for the plane maker assured pilots, MCAS was no threat. There were well-known procedures pilots could use to reestablish control in the case of an erroneous deployment. The underlying message from the folks at Boeing was that the problem was with the Lion Air pilots.

But it wasn’t just pilots and airlines Boeing was trying to convince. They took that message everywhere including to Wall Street releasing a press statement saying the 737 MAX “is as safe as any airplane that has ever flown the skies.” (The statement remains on the company website as of this writing.)

Boeing’s endorsement of its product notwithstanding, four and half months after the Lion Air disaster, an Ethiopian Airlines flight departed Addis Ababa and six minutes later, crashed into the ground, leaving a crater 30 feet deep. The gouge in the earth told air safety specialist and 737 Max captain John Gadzinski, the airplane “was flying at high speed and out of control when it hit the ground.”

Again, the company’s public position was that there was nothing wrong with the Max.

“We understand our airplane. We understand how the design was accomplished, how the certification was accomplished, and remain fully confident in the product,” Dennis Muilenburg then the CEO of Boeing said in a conference call five weeks after the second Max crash.

It was a month after an article in the Seattle Times by Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Dominic Gates. Boeing and FAA insiders told Gates, they realized there were problems with the Max design and certification before the Ethiopian crash. Boeing’s safety analysis of the system included incorrect assumptions and misunderstandings of how pilots would react. “The human factors were not properly evaluated,” they told Gates.

Watching the Max events unfold, having written a book about TWA 800 in 1999, I was astonished by how much the conflict between Boeing’s public statements and what was actually going on inside the company following the Max crashes mirrored what happened after the TWA disaster. Here is just one example.

Making fuel tanks resistant to explosions by removing oxygen from above the fuel had been discussed during the development of the 747 but it was abandoned as impractical and expensive. Over the decades, as tank explosions (listed below) stacked up, the subject reemerged always with the same response. It wasn’t needed, Boeing had other ways around the problem.

But after the loss of TWA 800, the company spent months telling reporters that a fuel tank explosion could not have caused the crash. Interviews I conducted while writing Deadly Departure showed me Boeing knew right after the crash, a fuel tank explosion was a possibility.

The night of the disaster, Fred Grenich, a specialist in fuel tank flammability at Boeing for more than two decades, got a call from Ivor Thomas, the company’s chief engineer of fuel systems for commercial airplanes. Thomas was putting together an in-house task force and wanted Grenich to be part of it. Before the call ended, Thomas told Grenich to be sure to bring all his data on fuel tank inerting, because Boeing was going to need it.

Over the past few decades, Boeing has been examined (and sometimes fined) six ways to Sunday by both houses of Congress, the Department of Transportation’s Inspector General, the Justice Department and several industry groups. It has taken a lot of heat. Whether the newest evidence of the company’s ethical and engineering lapses changes things is yet to be seen.

Thirty years after a spectacular crash that held the world’s attention for years, what remains apparent is the arrogance, disfunction and disingenuousness of Boeing and the FAA, the agency charged with overseeing it. Despite the success in determining what went wrong with Flight 800, recent events indicate the larger problems are unresolved.

TWA Flight 800 could have / should have changed things and it is all the more tragic that it did not.

A list of fuel tank explosions in Boeing commercial aircraft in the jet age

Before and after TWA Flight 800, airplane fuel tanks exploded when some source, a bomb, lightening, wire arching, or something else, ignited fuel vapors in tanks heated to ignition by mechanical equipment located below the tank. The full list of disasters on Boeing commercial jets is below. What makes this list so agitating, is that from the very first one, which killed 73 people on a flight to Philadelphia to the time of TWA’s deadly departure, Boeing was aware of the fuel tank hazard. It had studied and dismissed methods to protect the tanks.

707 in Maryland 1963

707 in Rome 1964

747 in Madrid 1976

727 in Colombia 1989

737 in Manila in 1990

747 (TWA 800) in 1996

737 in Bangkok in 2001

727 in Bangalore in 2006