ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, December 16, 1996 TAG: 9612160155
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: The New York Times
NOT ENOUGH of the pipe cited in Friday's announcement has been found, a crash prober said, to conclude anything.
A senior investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, who has been working in the Long Island hangar where the wreckage from TWA Flight 800 is being reassembled, said Sunday that he and other investigators directly involved in the wreckage analysis were surprised and disturbed by the assertion of his agency's leaders that they had identified a possible cause for the crash.
Friday, senior safety board officials in Washington announced they had identified a fuel-system piping problem in Boeing 747s and they considered it the leading culprit in the July 17 crash, which killed all 230 people on board. The agency said it had not concluded the problem actually caused the crash, but the board issued an urgent recommendation that airlines take steps to address the problem.
The senior investigator working on the wreckage, who insisted on anonymity, said crash investigators had recovered only a few pieces of the pipe in question, ``but nothing you could draw any conclusion from.''
The pipe is called the cross-feed manifold, and the safety board officials in Washington said Friday that they believed a flaw in it might have allowed static electricity to build, resulting in a spark that could have ignited fuel vapors in the plane's center fuel tank.
But the senior investigator, who said he was speaking for other investigators in the Calverton, N.Y., hangar, said that theory was purely hypothetical and not based on any evidence. In fact, he added, investigators have recovered so few pieces of the pipe that they have not even added it to a reconstruction of the center fuel tank wreckage.
``Static is not something we are confident of,'' this investigator said.
When the safety board's leaders made their announcement Friday, they opened a public rift with the leaders of the FBI's parallel, criminal inquiry. That night, James Kallstrom, who heads the FBI investigation, said: ``It's not prudent or professional to comment on what might or might not be the cause of this tremendous tragedy. And I am amazed that people continue to do that.''
The remarks on Sunday suggested a second rift, between the safety board's political leaders in Washington and the investigators at work on the case on Long Island.
LENGTH: Medium: 51 linesby CNB