Trevor Collins

On one hand, you have the drop in the air pressure outside of the plane that happens as you climb in altitude.

There's somewhere between 13,000 and 15,000 feet.

And the fuel vapor in this tank is now able to, under this new

environmental pressure mixed with oxygen in a way that creates an explosive concoction it's an explosive ratio again it's alarming but it's not the end of the world so to speak until something else happens

And again, we don't know this for certain, but one of the other prominent theories I read about was that, yes, it's low voltage wiring going through this, but somewhere up elsewhere in the plane, these low voltage sensors are right next to high voltage lighting wires.

And so as the cabin lights are being used, turned off and on.

These exposed old chafed wires might have just had a spot where energy could arc.

So this high voltage jumps to the low voltage, shoots down the wire, ends up in the tank, arcs, ignites and creates an explosion.

And then you have what happened that day.

Yep, it is a tragic combination of situational uncertainty, just things that happened.

Again, none of them being dangerous in their own right, but the biggest, the biggest issue, and a lot of lessons learned came from this,

was that they found that throughout this aircraft, there was a lot of exposed wiring, a lot of old wires that should have at some point been replaced or identified.

And that is what ended up lighting, again, the fuse, essentially.

That's probably what happened.

So again, that's one of the other prominent theories for what happened to ignite it.

We may never really, really know for 100% fact, but suffice to say, there's several reasons or several ways that would have been ignited that all kind of makes sense.

And it gets tough because it is a slightly older aircraft.

And so any of that wear and tear could show up by creating a spark.

So this is the official final consensus of the NTSB and its final report was released on August 23rd, 2000, where the case was closed.

So just over four years after the accident.