China Airlines Flight 120 - 19 Years Ago

The 737 continued to burn uncontrolled until the tail collapsed to the ground - Xinhua

Uniberp came out to visit last week. He stopped in Seattle and gave us this report:

We attended an interesting presentation at the Museum of Flight, given by a retired engineer at Boeing, who worked on the investigation into the fire on China Airlines Flight 120, which caught fire on the ground and all persons escaped.

He described the design that resulted in a loose bolt from a leading edge flap puncturing the wing tank when the flap was retracted. The investigation resulted in a changed design to the flap that eliminated a micro-fine control of the flap movement, concluding the extra complexity was not worth the miniscule performance improvement.

He said "Those aerodynamicists, they use every trick they can, no matter how complex it makes it for engineering. One millimeter gap, ooooh we must do something." He was kind of dismissive of them.

Most of the docents seemed to be old retired Boeing guys.

Wikipedia has a page about this.

By the time the fire was extinguished, most of the plane had been destroyed - Mayday

Diagram of slat extension mechanism

Bolt that punctured the fuel tank