> inspection comes down to a flashlight and a Mark I eyeball, looking for that cracks that might be lurking.
Where is our reassurance that everything is OK now??
Where is our reassurance that everything is OK now??
> In the 1970s, the most common wire for aircraft was Kapton-insulated wire. Kapton is a DuPont trade name. Today, aircraft wiring is typically insulated with Teflon, Tefzel, Cross Link Tefzel or TKT (Teflon-Kapton-Teflon). Typically, the AVS for an aircraft lists the type of wire insulation that will be used throughout the aircraft. For example, the OEM might decide that TKT will be used, with some exceptions such as radio cables and Teflon-insulated wire in boxed assemblies.
I've worked with kapton tape (but never kapton insulted wire) and I can't imagine it being much good as insulation for wires.
I've also worked with lots of PTFE insulated wire and it was nice to work with, but only once you'd got used to its low friction.
Your reassurance is the fact that flying is the safest form of travel thanks to decades of diligent work by engineers, mechanics and accident investigators.
Also, I suspect that circuit checks could detect at least some shorts in wiring that can't be physically inspected.
At least some gigabit ethernet interfaces have built in weaker TDR that measures the length of each twisted pair, but I've only ever had one computer that showed that info in the BIOS/UEFI.
So, maybe if TDR is used for inspection, we can rest assured.
I've seen this info in the Realtek NIC diagnostic tool for windows (on one machine, anyway), and I've got a couple of semi-managed switches that show a line length estimate which I assume is based on similar measurements.
This is what I was told by the person who saw the demo. I believe them, because it'd just be a matter of sending an impulse (or sweeping a tone) and looking at all of the spikes in the impulse response.
Unfortunately it is rather false-positive prone when applied to fences, significant wind loading can cause the chain-link to lash back and forth and repeatedly deflect the cable. The resulting alarm fatigue was implicated in the somewhat (in)famous case of the nuns as site Y-12. Nonetheless this application is very common at federal installations and also certain non-federal infrastructure installations, e.g. the legacy iron fences around Portland, Oregon's surface water reservoirs (where remote-controlled PTZ cameras appear to be used for rapid remote confirmation of FiberPatrol detections... you can give the fence a shake and watch a camera pan to you almost immediately).