Statement on the 20th Anniversary of the TWA-800 Accident

July 2016

Flying on a U.S. airline is incredibly safe and the fuel tanks on commercial airplanes
are far safer today than they were 20 years ago. The tragic 1996 TWA 800 accident
claimed the lives of 230 people and challenged the established assumptions about
fuel tanks. Shortly after the accident, aviation experts concluded that fuel tank
inerting could not be performed successfully on commercial airplanes. But scientists
and engineers at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and in the aviation
industry refused to give up and invented a new, practical solution for the U.S.
commercial aircraft fleet.

Since the accident, the FAA has pursued a safety solution that eliminates ignition
sources and reduces fuel tank flammability. The FAA has issued 375 Airworthiness
Directives over the past 20 years to eliminate ignition sources. The FAAs July 21,
2008 final fuel tank rule required operators and manufacturers of passenger
commercial airplanes to reduce the flammability levels of fuel tank vapors to reduce
the risk of a potential explosion from an ignition source. The rule requires the
retrofit of commercial airplanes with a way to reduce fuel tank flammability, such as
inerting, by December 26, 2017. An inerting system lowers the oxygen content of
the air in the fuel tank to a level where the fuel vapor will not ignite and replaces it
with an inert gas.

Boeing and Airbus have been filling orders for retrofit kits and operators have met
the 50 percent retrofit deadline that spanned December 2014 to December 2015.
The FAA granted only one exemption to Aeromexico that extended the 50 percent
deadline for 13 airplanes from December 2014 to December 2015. That exemption
did not extend the airlines December 2017 deadline for a 100 percent retrofit. The
FAA has not received any requests to extend the 100 percent retrofit deadline and
expects all operators to complete their retrofit on time.

Southwest and United Airlines qualified for a one-year extension to this deadline if
they started using ground-conditioned air that reduced fuel tank flammability prior
to flight by 2009.

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Alison Duquette
FAA Office of Communications