Raiders of the Lost Arc

...While acknowledging that "we have had damaged airplanes" due to Kapton flashovers, David Pielmeier, the Navy's top wiring engineer, said the service banned it in new planes because of concerns it would explode in combat, not in peacetime use...

...A Stan Jones is a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram...

...Boeing refused, as have other U.S...

...Aircraft manufacturers, both military and civilian, hailed Kapton as a nearperfect insulator, and it became the mainstay of aircraft electrical systems...

...Therefore, although revolutionary in design and untested in the field, Kapton was subjected only to the less-strenuous performance tests set in conjunction with industry representatives...

...But what about the safety of the aircraft now in service...

...DuPont de Nemours and Company, it became an overnight success story...

...But BBs were all it took in Norfolk...

...The chafe-free video The military has had far worse problems with Kapton...

...In messages to navy brass, the safety center concluded that repeated mishaps were "not a problem until Kapton wire was introduced in 1979...

...Top air force officials, faced with tremendous space constraints in the small, single-engine F-16s, have argued to defense procurement officials that no other insulation is compact enough to replace Kapton...

...For its creator, E.I...

...Once an arc is applied to it . . . ," he said, "it is a potential small bomb...

...Bell officials defend Kapton, and the company continues to use it unless a buyer specifies a different wiring...

...Trans World Airlines reported 22 instances of wire fires or arcing on its fleet of 30 L-1011 jetliners between 1972 and 1981...

...Almost as soon as the insulation was put into service, maintenance crews complained that Kapton was brittle and fragile, breaking easily when bent...

...Quick fixes, such as rerouting wires, adding extra layers of insulation, and tutoring sailors on handling Kapton with more care, became the prescription of choice...

...The experience with Kapton left such a bad taste that a company official wrote Boeing in 1981 and asked that the insulation not be used on the Boeing 767 jets that TWA was planning to buy...

...At the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C...

...Kapton wiring is an Achilles' heel in the military's most sophisticated flying fortresses...

...Military sources say the Air Force will seek a waiver from the Pentagon to allow continued Kapton use in the 180 new F-16s that annually roll off the General Dynamics assembly line in Fort Worth...

...When the Naval Air Command moved to ban Kapton beginning in 1984, the pilots were informed but the public was kept in the dark...

...Plagued by electrical fires in its frontline F-16 fighters, which contain ten miles of Kapton each, the service argued that better installation and maintenance was the key...

...In the commercial sector, Lockheed began using Kapton in 1972, in its L-1011 jetliners...

...single bullet holds the potential to cripple, or even doom, the nation's most formidable fighting aircraft...

...But that was little consolation for the Navy...

...The tiny pellets, fired from a Daisy air rifle, produced the electrical equivalent of a nervous breakdown...

...The most serious incident involving Kapton and commercial aircraft occurred in January 1985, when a wire fire temporarily knocked out the main power in a Boeing 757 packed with passengers 30,000 feet over the Atlantic...

...With design changes, Pielmeier said, the potential for flashover fires during routine flight falls within "an acceptable envelope of risk ." To acknowledge Kapton as unsafe would be an admission by the service that most of its aircraft are unsafe—and therefore should be grounded...

...For planes, the stress of carrierdeck takeoffs and landings has a bump-and-grind effect, causing the Kapton to rub against clamps and sometimes crack or break...

...The Air Force formed special "chafing awareness teams," produced a video to alert crews to the dangers of chafing, and enacted 60 chafe-preventing changes in engineering...

...The potential for more serious Kapton problems captured the attention of Pete Kochis, a safety official at the Federal Aviation Administration assigned to monitor Kapton complaints...

...It would also be expensive...

...If handled with kid gloves in a laboratory environment, fine, but in the real world, where you're jerking engines in and out, ...you don't have time to be playing games with something tender," said Harold Summers, the leasing company's maintenance vice president...

...A similar admission by aircraft builders would invite hundreds of lawsuits...

...The Navy Safety Center in Norfolk, which monitors accident reports, announced in 1982 that 25 fires had broken out on F-4 and RF-4 aircraft since 1979, four of them in the cockpits during flight...

...Nevertheless, navy aeronautical engineers tended to discount these early warnings, contending that sloppy maintenance and poor aircraft design were responsible for the problems, rather than the type of insulation used...

...Although key components of military aircraft, such as engines, fuel cells, and sophisticated onboard computers, have long been built with an eye toward surviving combat, the electrical wiring that links them has not...

...But this inching forward could easily turn into a backslide...

...In 1987, when the Kapton controversy finally surfaced in news reports, army and air force spokesmen initially denied that the wiring was even a matter of concern...

...The insulation, known as Spec 55, is slightly heavier than Kapton...

...That same year, a frustrated navy squadron chief gave an aviator's perspective on the Kapton issue after an inflight fire forced an emergency landing by an AV-8B Harrier jump-jet...

...Intensified effort corrects existing failure but chafing fires occur in different areas...

...There are 400,000 miles of Kapton wire stuffed inside navy F-14s and F-18s, air force F-16s and B-1B bombers, army helicopters, and marine corps jump-jets...

...But more recently, in tests and in the field, Kapton has been found susceptible to a phenomenon known as "flashover...

...Evidence supports the Kapton wire as [a] contributing factor," the center argued in a communique to navy headquarters...

...Even the Navy, which was the first to suspect a correlation between wire fires and Kapton, the first to document flashover in the laboratory, and the first to move toward a ban, won't acknowledge Kapton fires as a safety hazard...

...Exploding wires are listed as a possible factor in the crash of a navy jet in 1986 and in at least a dozen other cases in which military aircraft have faced a power loss or fire but managed to land safely...

...Eugene L. Kelsey, head of the aeronautical engineering branch at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, likened Kapton to a bomb ticking inside the bellies of countless U.S...

...It's easy to see how such a waiver could spread...

...In an August 1986 memo to his superiors, obtained through the FOIA, Kochis wrote "it is conceivable that under the right conditions, this phenomena could impact the FAA in a fashion similar to the 'booster seal' experiences of NASA ." It was a faulty 0-ring booster seal, of course, that caused the explosion of NASA's space shuttle Challenger...

...More than 100 other aircraft wire fires, both on and off the ground, have occurred under circumstances that bear striking similarities, military records suggest, but hard evidence to link them to Kapton is lacking...

...A higher FAA official, Leroy Keith, director of aircraft certification, described Kochis's comment as "over dramatic," and said the agency, though actively studying the problem, believes Kapton is safe in commercial aircraft...

...And it might not even take a bullet...

...Moreover, DuPont touted Kapton as abrasion- and fire-resistant...

...It fit into the tightest of spaces in fighters, and its low weight saved precious fuel in the highly competitive commercial market...

...The estimate does not include another 2,000 nontactical navy aircraft, the 7,200 air force planes, or the 8,500 active army helicopters...

...The Army has already outlawed Kapton for its next generation helicopter, dubbed LHX, and the Navy has done so for its secret new attack plane...

...Military aircraft take more abuse, and the wiring is crammed into smaller spaces, which increases the chances of chafing...

...Two navy pilots ejected safely after a fire developed in the rear equipment compartment...

...The aircraft landed using backup power...

...The engineer wanted to know if wires like those that make up the delicate nervous system of a U.S...

...Meanwhile, with enough Kapton in military aircraft alone to circle the world 13 times, critics contend that the potential for accidents is high...

...Fires continued to occur even on newly routed and better protected wires...

...Limping into Lisbon Wire types, distinguished by the insulations that cover them, underwent a transformation 20 years ago when Kapton came along...

...Unlike engines, radar, or flight control systems, electrical wiring was not considered a major component...

...In his backyard, he took a handful of electrical wires, strapped them to a piece of metal, energized them with current, and fired BBs at them...

...The implications of that 1984 experiment began to crystallize a year later, when the tests moved from the back lot to the laboratory and BBs were replaced by .30 caliber bullets...

...The aircraft, owned by Monarch Airlines of England and enroute from the Canary Islands to Luton, England, made an emergency landing in Lisbon, Portugal, and no injuries were reported...

...He added that "the problems just almost went away" after Bell switched to an alternative wire made by a DuPont competitor, Raychem Corp...

...The company contends its product has become a scapegoat for fires resulting from sloppy repair work or poor aircraft design...

...Instead, the military services and industry have embarked on a gradual course of change...

...The test, while amateurish, had a serious military purpose...

...The problems first cropped up at sea, in the harsh aircraft-carrier operations of the Navy...

...The Navy has estimated that rewiring its fleet of 3,000 fighter planes alone would cost at least $3 billion...

...Executives at Petroleum Helicopter Inc., a major Gulf Coast helicopter-leasing company headquartered in Louisiana, became so fed up with Kapton's breakage and corrosion that they lobbied Bell Helicopter Textron Inc...

...Reports from air force bases on the F-16 alone contain references to almost 50 electrical fires, both on the ground and in flight, between 1978 and 1986...

...At the time, they said, they never would have believed that Kapton could explode...

...The experts found it difficult to believe that any insulation could be reponsible for so many problems, several of them said recently...

...Under fire...

...In 1982 it undertook an $89 million revamping of the F-16's electrical system—a project given the rip-roaring name "Falcon Rally"—rerouting and reinforcing dozens of wire bundles...

...and the Naval Air Test Center in Patuxent River, Maryland, technicians found that although one wire type would erupt in a fireworks display of sparks and flame when fired upon, two other types would not...

...Military officials continue to drag their heels in finding a fix, even as wire fires account for an increasing number of damaged aircraft...

...The military's use of Kapton began in 1970, when the Navy installed it in its C-2 transport aircraft...

...The wires seemed to explode...

...A potential exists," the officer said in a report to his superiors, "with the subsequent shorting of the [Kapton] wires, for a future airborne, ground-refueling, or maintenancerelated accident to occur at any time if this problem is not rectified ." Military experts studying the problem say the question isn't whether such an accident will occur, but when...

...They are rewriting wiring specifications to include flashover and ballistics tests...

...The fire erupted when alkaline toilet fluid leaked onto damaged Kapton wires, causing a flashover fire that destroyed power cables to both aircraft generators...

...DuPont, with annual Kapton sales estimated at more than $100 million, maintains that Kapton outperforms all competitors if properly installed and maintained...

...Classified navy documents show that a navy EA-6B jet plunged into the sea off the California coast on June 27, 1986...

...The Navy has banned Kapton in new planes and in repairs to existing ones...

...In June 1981, Rear Admiral Virgil Moore, then commander of the Navy's Pacific flight operations, wrote, "The incidence of wire chafing, recurring inspections, and fire hazards grows directly with the number of aircraft with Kapton wiring...

...The chief investigator cited a "catastrophic failure of aircraft wiring" as a possible cause...

...The Army is moving toward a similar ban, and the Air Force has restricted its use...

...TWA bought the planes anyway...

...This insulation was thinner, lighter, and in many ways stronger than anything previously made...

...fighter plane could withstand a barrage of enemy gunfire...

...A Pentagon group assembled at the Navy's request in 1982 to review Kapton problems reached a similar conclusion...

...And the salt air tends to degrade Kapton, leading to arcing and flashovers...

...For reasons still not fully understood, Kapton wires sometimes explode under the routine stress of peacetime flight...

...Military sources say the Air Force is also planning a Kapton ban for its classified new Advanced Tactical Fighter...

...Earlier this year, one air force base temporarily stopped washing its F-16s because the solvents were eating at the Kapton and starting fires as the jets prepared for takeoff...

...The Navy's tests are no small matter...

...Records show that when Kapton was introduced 20 years ago, it escaped the rigorous governmentsupervised testing required for other important aircraft materials...

...The char provides a path for the arc to spread to adjacent wires, creating a feeding frenzy of high-voltage arcing and fire that was described, even in the detached vernacular of the Navy's official reports, as "catastrophic...

...aircraft manufacturers, defending Kapton's field performance...

...It was a sure bet that the enemy wouldn't be using BBs in a dogfight...

...Worn or otherwise damaged wires can produce an arc—a ribbon of current between exposed wires...

...The Air Force also looked for shortcuts to fix its wiring problems...

...Other widely used insulations also produce arcs, but only Kapton carbonizes from the arc's heat, instantly degrading into a charry, graphite-like material that is highly conductive...

...It is also the most popular wiring in commercial jetliners, and it can be found in intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear power plants...

...And when it did burn, it emitted less smoke than other types—an important consideration for airline passenger compartments...

...Kapton, the type of wire used most often in the Navy's hottest frontline fighters—and those of the other service branches as well—was the one given to pyrotechnics...

...But fires continued to plague the fleet...

...Aircraft manufacturers tend to agree, saying evidence is insufficient to indicate that Kapton is inferior to any other insulation type...

...Nevertheless, the most recent F-16 wiring study, completed by the Air Force in September 1986, found that while many of the chafing problems plaguing older F-16s had been fixed, they were resurfacing in newer planes...

...Though no deaths have been traced to the wiring, military documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that it has become a suspect in a rash of inflight fires aboard both military and commercial planes as well as aboard the space shuttle Columbia...

...The Navy's Air Logistics Center in Washington noted in 1982 that just as field engineers got a handle on one nagging problem, a new one would surface...

...aircraft...

...These tests omitted such simple considerations as ease of maintenance, reaction to salt-water exposure, bending, and stress...

...Within six to eight years of its introduction, according to navy reports, Kapton had become an ongoing maintenance headache and a potential safety threat...

...The final navy report said the crash was caused by either a wiring failure or a rupture of the tank...

...As early as 1982 the Navy's own safety experts claimed that Kapton fires were endangering its aircraft, but pilots were not warned...

...The investigation found that a bundle of Kapton wires had arced and burned and that a nearby metal tank of highly flammable liquid oxygen had ruptured...

...of Fort Worth to eliminate the insulation on business helicopters sold to the company...

...The $3 billion bill The Air Force position is indicative of a stubborn resistance throughout the military, the FAA, NASA, and the aviation industry to publicly acknowledge the blotches on Kapton's report card...