NTSB recommendations sometimes ignored

Thirty-eight years have passed since a Pan American jet crashed into a Maryland cornfield, killing all 82 people on board and prompting federal safety investigators to call for nonflammable gas in fuel tanks.

That hasn't happened.

Only two months after the March explosion of a fuel tank on a Thai Airways jet killed one person, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended this step again. -- and again, it went unheeded.

That was four years after the explosion of TWA Flight 800 shortly after takeoff from John F. Kennedy Airport, en route from New York to Paris. Several theories evolved about that tragedy, in which 230 people perished, but safety investigators fingered a familiar villain: an exploding fuel tank.

The introduction of nonburning gases for fuel tanks is high on the agency's wish list, one of a dozen most-wanted safety improvements for 2001.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...212EDT0448.DTL