Subject

Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1998 16:27:11 +0800
From: John Sampson <sampson@iinet.net.au>
To: Mark Fetherolf <fetherolf@platinum.com>

Mark,
The reasons are reasonably evident and explicable. Firstly, many crews luck out by having their cockpit or cabin fires in
relatively benign environments (i.e. good weather, day-time with a visual horizon to fly by, close to an emergency alternate
airport; electrical design-friendly airframe etc). That means that 90% of crews get away with it and don't become a statistic. If there are no statistics, just incidents, then FAA can get away with such statements as: " To date we know of no passengers in the last ten years that have died because of a wiring fault etc". Statistics, when finely tuned, are true deviltry in the hands of a bureaucrat. Please read about last week's B737 total electric failure at:
smokingun.html
The Kaptonitis hazard is only now beginning to assume more significant proportions - because Kapton doesn't age gracefully.You can therefore expect an increasingly greater number of incidents actually attributable to Kapton -but the FAA will always be looking to allot the cause elsewhere (i.e. it's too hard a bullet to bite). Unfortunately such smithereening accidents as SR111 are very difficult to definitively attribute to a specific cause. The latest info I have is that the investigators are thoroughly confused by the revelations of the DFDR and its timelines. They have decided that a lot of the data on the DFDR has been corrupted by the electrical malfunction (i.e. a lot of the events on the DFDR didn't really happen). That is one of the really devilish things about electrical malfunctions - they throw everything into an anomalous frenzy and such devices as the DFDR begin to tell lies.

However I think the word about aircraft wiring and Kapton is starting to become common property and more safety conscious airlines will be looking for a realistic solution to the conundrum. As has been said many times it is just not practical to rewire these many many aircraft. Besides loss of operating revenue for the three months (each) that it would take, it is tantamount cost-wise to totally dismantling an airliner and rebuilding it from scratch. Similarly you cannot afford to trash them with their low flying hours and initially high capital costs. The only real answer is the Virgin Bus. It could be designed and incorporated in fairly short order and should be a very, very safe fall-back position for a crew faced with an electrical "fire of unknown origin". It is designed to avoid the very time-consuming, unduly optimistic and potentially lethal style of checklist that's been around for decades. That checklist is even more inappropriate in today's "electric jets". Modern jet-liners have three times the wiring and electrical consumption of their 1960's equivalents (and now, only a two man crew in most instances). Passengers would feel very safe knowing that their flight-crew wasn't gambling against the clock with their lives while trying desperately to trace and isolate the source. It's always been an open-ended checklist that never ever told you what to do when you couldn't locate the source. Airline crews don't have any indepth training on their aircraft's electrical circuitry. All they know is that certain systems are powered by certain busses, the number of generators, batteries and backup devices (APU's, air-driven generators, Ram air Turbines). In many cases inflight access to circuit breakers is limited and/or operators have no procedures for crews to check or manipulate CB's. Indeed systems are nowadays so electronically complex and interrelated that "a little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing". Crew responses to circumstances are therefore limited to running checklists. In-depth systems knowledge died with the demise of the professional Flight Engineer. You might form the opinion that this makes modern flight crews very robotic and lacking in any scope for initiative. Simulator smoke reproductions normally degenerate to less of a realistic drill and more of a discussion - because dense smoke is hard to simulate and electrical fire malfunctions can anyways be so multi-faceted. There's no telling where, or how far, one will go. In the case of SR111 I think that my chain of likely
events spelt out in:

switcher.html
and

solution.html
is very close to what happened. The crew never got a chance to run out of ideas, the fire killed all the electrics and, in the
cockpit environment that resulted, there was very little chance of them NOT losing control. In fact there was (or would have been under my theory) NIL electric instrumentation left. If you re-read the two contrasting scenarios in:
responses.html (see "Manage your Outcomes")

you will see graphically "what happened" and "what might have been". The only real solution to the "budding maelstrom" of a Kapton flash-over is to power down the normal electrics. You may not be aware but, even before the SR111 crew started looking at the possibility of an electrical fault as being the source of smoke, they spent a lot of time calling up the airconditioning pages on their synoptic screen and running that checklist. That much has come out of the DFDR. It's a true "fiddle whilst the fire burns" situation with current checklisting protocols.

Of course you will be told that a stand-alone Virgin Bus is technically impossible and would cost millions per airframe etc.
However, because I am advocating a very basic/purposely simple "get-you-home" configuration only, it actually should not cost the earth nor be very intricate. I admit that the design process would take some fathoming but weigh that minuscule time and cost against the $billions (yes $Billions) that SR111 will end up costing the insurers. Why, you might ask, will the Sr111 litigation cost that much? The easy answer is that I think that, as it will be the Canadian TSB that will write the final report, it may be more honest than you would expect from an FAA massaged NTSB report. It will not apportion blame but the job of the lawyers should be reasonably easy in that regard. There will be some large degree of responsibility and culpability easily provable. Now just imagine how easy the lawyers will find it to boost those settlements for the Kapton 2 and Kapton 3 accidents. At the end of the day risk assessments will be actuarially re-evaluated, premiums will sky-rocket and ticket prices will rise proportionately. It would be cheaper in the short or long run to bite the bullet and incorporate the Virgin BUS. It would be a good ticket-seller I think. Every day I'm getting Emails from frightened would-be passengers who, at the end of the day would rather take an ocean-cruise holiday than fly unnecessarily. They have correctly identified "fire-in-the-air" as a very lethal gamble under current wiring, outmoded checklists and aviation authority attitudes.

Being very realistic about it all you must expect that the pragmatists (read "bean-counters" or accountants) in the airline industry will find it very hard to justify any such outlays. In the same vein as road traffic authorities not installing traffic lights until there's been a specified number of fatal traffic accidents at an intersection, little will be done. There is after all a firm dollar cost per seat formula for funding aviation safety. The lip-service response to any revelations about Kapton wiring concerns will be met by a program such as Armand Bruning's "inspection by sample and lot", ticking fault detectors and other such "geriatric airliner inspection" style piecemeal FAA initiated gestures. The inappropriate checklists will not be amended "because there's no other viable option" (short of a virgin bus) and because "we've always done it that way". You cannot expect airline crews to stick their necks out and exert any industrial clout over it because it's still really in the province of : "It won't happen to me". And, believe it or not, non-executive airline crews are way down on the totem pole when it comes to fundamental design safety issues (as compared to operational flying safety issues).....despite their butts being truly on the line every flying day.

I also like to think about it in the following fashion. I'm reminded of the F105 Thunderchief. When I was in Vietnam the USAF was losing them at an average of one a day. With only one very complex hydraulic system it took only one failure or flaw or hit and that "THUD" was instantly disposable.That's OK for an ejection-seat equipped fighter but there aren't too many single-engined airliners flying around and the trans-oceanic twin-engined ones are all subject to very firm strictures under the ETOPS regulation (extended range Overwater Twin Ops). i.e. the authorities have always felt duty-bound to insist upon more than one propulsion unit. However, in an all-electric jet (that cannot continue to fly in an electrically inert condition) we abide by one electrical system and kid ourselves that it is inviolate (Kapton and metallized mylar blankets notwithstanding). Well that chicken came home to roost with SR111.