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News and Views | Beyond the City | Tuesday, November 02, 1999 Danger From Inside Plane In the end, the wire insulation on EgyptAir Flight 990 might turn out to have had nothing to do with the plane plummeting toward the ocean at 287 mph Sunday morning. And even though the same insulation burned in Swissair 111 last year, it might have played no part in that crash, either. But the insulation — called Kapton — is being removed, systematically, from Air Force One, just as it is being stripped from all Air Force, Coast Guard and Navy aircraft. Kapton was banned from new military aircraft more than a decade ago. All the space shuttles were grounded last summer because damaged Kapton wiring was discovered on Columbia. "I don't know if it will be found as the cause or part of it, but these are facts, and people ought to know about them," Lynn Romano says. "The complacency about air safety is stunning." On Sept. 2, 1998, her husband, Ray, 44, who was based in New York as a partner with the KPMG accounting concern, got in a car for JFK and boarded a Swissair flight. The plane went down in Peggy's Cove, in Newfoundland. Lynn Romano wants to know why, and not for the money: Any compensation she gets for his death will be put into the International Aviation Safety Association, which she has founded. "Blood money is how I see it," she says. "I know that's not how others in this situation look at it, and they have to do what's right for them." For her, the discussion starts with wiring. Whatever the significance of insulation in the Swissair or EgyptAir catastrophes, the episode opens a small window into how aircraft are regulated. In 1991, the Federal Aviation Administration issued an advisory circular on several fire-safety issues. These included a warning not to reset circuit breakers on wires insulated by Kapton. "That causes an explosive condition," says Ed Block, a consultant who was once the military's leading cable and wiring expert. "They issued that as an advisory circular, and it should have been an airworthiness directive," Romano says. That would have carried more teeth, she says, and made it mandatory for the airlines to tell their pilots. Instead, the Swissair checklist for smoke in the cabin calls for the pilots to shut off all the switches, a third at a time, which amounts to the same thing as throwing a circuit breaker. "The pilot didn't want to die," Romano said. "He did it because he didn't know." Resetting a breaker on a hot Kapton wire can cause it to explode, experts say. When a latrine failed to flush on an Air Canada plane 18 years ago, the crew assumed the motor had short-circuited. They reset the breaker. The wiring overheated, caught fire, and it moved from the toilet area through the plane. The fumes killed 23 people. Cracked wiring also has been implicated in the TWA Flight 800 crash by the National Transportation Safety Board. Fumes in the center fuel tank were ignited, then exploded. "The FAA's position is that there is no data that shows us any particular type of wiring is a significant problem in the U.S. civil aviation fleet," a spokesman for the agency said recently. The FAA is a cautious operation, regulating a powerful industry that demands solid proof before it will undertake a hugely expensive project like replacing the wiring, which could effectively mean that an airliner has to be scrapped. A 767 could have 150 miles of wires. Military aircraft are different, the FAA says, because those planes land and take off in extreme conditions, such as aircraft carriers, where they are exposed to saltwater and high humidity. The Swissair crash seems to have been caused by fire and smoke, probably a result of failed wires. The TWA disaster was the result of a fuel tank that exploded, possibly ignited by frayed wires. Could a failure in wiring have caused the destruction of the EgyptAir flight? Yes, says Block, who now serves on an FAA advisory panel on aging aircraft and studies crashes for lawyers who sue airlines. He offers three scenarios for the most recent disaster. A bomb, which does not seem likely because the plane appeared intact on radar as it plunged from 33,000 to 19,000 feet. "You also could have the simultaneous failure of both engines, which has never happened," Block says. "Or you could have a wiring-induced shortage of the autopilot system. Which has happened." In 1991, an Evergreen Airlines flight from Anchorage to New York suddenly rolled to the right and dived 10,000 feet before the pilots regained control and made an emergency landing in Duluth, Minn. "Spurious" signals to the autopilot caused the plane to dive, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. If the autopilot caused the EgyptAir plane to plunge, the pilots might have tried to right it, and tremendous pressures would have broken the plane apart at 19,000 feet, Block argues. His theory remains in the realm of pure speculation. "At least people are paying attention," Romano says. "Do you know how many people ignored the Swissair flight because it didn't happen in the U.S.?" Four months after the Swissair crash, the government that is supposed to stand for the Romano family issued a press release. "New Year's Eve, the FAA statement says that 1998 had been an 'incident-free' year, no loss of life on American soil or water," Romano says. "Because my husband's plane, which was filled with Americans, which was built in America and took off from America, fell out of the sky a few miles over the border. "How dare they."
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