By Shelley Emling, Palm Beach Post-Cox News Service
Sunday, May 13, 2001

NEW YORK -- When a Boeing 737 burst into flames at a Bangkok airport in March, just minutes before the prime minister of Thailand and 148 passengers were to board, authorities immediately assumed sabotage was to blame.

Today they know better.

Like the crash of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island in 1996 and the Swissair Flight 111 disaster two years later, the accident now is believed to be linked to faulty wiring.

These watershed incidents are evidence of a serious problem, one the airline industry is trying to come to grips with: aging planes filled with brittle, fraying wires that have become ancient by electrical standards.

And as wiring continues to age across the country, any densely wired system is vulnerable -- cars, homes, subways, even the space shuttle.

But today, new technologies are being developed to combat the hidden hazard.

"Smart wires" are being created that will one day act like a plane's very own nervous system, self-diagnosing problem spots and informing pilots so that they have time to avert disasters.

But it could be several years before smart wiring is ready, and "every day you see more and more emergency landings, more smoke inside cockpits, all sorts of problems that are related to wiring," said Edward Block, an aircraft wiring expert.

Block is part of a task force formed by the Federal Aviation Administration and the aviation industry that uncovered cracks in wiring last year while inspecting dozens of jets.

Aviation experts say that's not surprising, considering that the average U.S. Navy plane is 16 years old and the average commercial plane is 18 years old. Many planes were designed to fly only a decade or so.

Unlike most parts on commercial planes, wiring isn't routinely replaced or thoroughly inspected, since it's generally inaccessible.

According to the National Transportation Safety Board, faulty wiring probably caused the fuel tank aboard TWA Flight 800 to explode, killing all 230 people aboard.

Block claims that 14,000 planes flying today are loaded with defective wires.

"No one these days can doubt there's a problem, yet no one seems to be doing anything about it," he said.

The typical wide-body jet can have some 150 miles of wire buried inside it, snaking through all parts of the aircraft like a spider web. Rewiring a plane can cost more than scrapping it.

That's what makes the quick development of wiring technologies so crucial.

Cynthia Furse, associate professor in Utah State University's electrical and computer engineering department, is heading a U.S. Navy-backed project to create a wiring system that can diagnose breaks in wires and relay both their nature and location to the pilots.

This "smart wire" system is likely to employ "reflectometry," which works like a tiny radar to send a signal down a wire and "sense" the reflection that returns.

Furse hopes to demonstrate the system by February 2002 so that it might be ready for implementation by the Navy by 2005.

Working with Utah State is Albuquerque, N.M.-based Management Sciences Inc., which is creating other wiring systems that rely on tiny machines about the size of a pea to detect changes in the current travelling through wires and to then inform a computer of these changes.

In addition, the FAA is developing new technologies, including "arc-fault" circuit-breakers that rely on microcomputers to analyze current flow so that it's halted the second a hazardous arc starts to form.

Currently, the circuit-breakers in most aircraft are not unlike those that safeguard a hair dryer. They are designed to detect only the most serious bursts of current, such as those that would occur when a dryer is dropped into a tub of water. They generally don't protect against small sparks that can occur when aging, frayed wires come in contact with another object. But it's these small "arcs" that can lead to explosions.

This research into new technologies might never have occurred without the TWA Flight 800 disaster, which spurred calls for wiring to be considered a system in and of itself, instead of an afterthought used only to connect other systems.

Charles Huettner, the White House's senior policy adviser for aviation, agrees that the issue of aging wiring has been overlooked, partly because it's an expensive and time-consuming problem to rectify.

Huettner headed a White House commission on aging wiring that published a report on the issue in November. It concluded that faulty wiring in homes, planes, nuclear power plants, and in other buildings poses a risk to public health and safety.

He pointed out that home wiring systems caused more than 40,000 fires in 1997, resulting in 250 deaths and more than $670 million in property damage.

In 1998, Volkswagen was forced to recall all 10,000 of the New Beetles it had sold in the United States and Canada, citing a wiring problem that could cause engine fires.

He agreed that public scrutiny has been on the rise, prompting harshly worded recommendations from all sorts of agencies.

In a September report, the NTSB concluded that until recently, "insufficient attention has been paid to the condition of aircraft electrical wiring, resulting in potential safety hazards."

The board recommended that aircraft incorporate "new technology, such as arc-fault circuit breakers and automated wire test equipment."

But experts say solutions are not clear-cut and that it's up to the FAA to decide what happens next.

The FAA expanded its aging aircraft program in 1998 to target wiring troubles in older planes. Just last year an FAA task force found 182 potentially hazardous wire-related conditions, such as cracking, on 81 planes it inspected.

Elizabeth Erickson, the FAA's director of aircraft certification, said "cracked wires do not, in and of themselves, represent an immediate safety problem" but that they are "of concern to us."

Now the FAA must decide what steps, if any, it should take to address wiring concerns, such as whether to step up inspections of wiring or even put a specific life span on wiring so that it would have to be replaced after a certain amount of years.

A broad-based group investigating wiring for the FAA, the Aging Transport Systems Rulemaking Advisory Committee, met in late April and hopes to recommend a list of new regulations governing wiring to the FAA within the next year or so.

"I'd say that this is the biggest issue facing the commercial airline industry," Block said. "And it's an issue that's still going to be with us 20 years from now."

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