"Whoa there. Slow down," I urged. "Take a deep breath, Tom. Now tell me slowly what's going on."
Tom explained that the airplane manufacturer had really goofed. He was calling me from his office inside the factory where he was one of a couple dozen government monitors of the work being done for the Air Force.
The civilian aircraft production line folks working on our military plane had made a serious error. Fixing it would cost the manufacturer tens of thousands of dollars, an expense that they would have to absorb and not the taxpayer. It was not a matter of their trying to cover the problem up. Their military contract team was unaware of what their commercial production folks had done.
What had they done that was all that devastating? They over-crimped hundreds of wire connectors resulting in a cascade of weird malfunctions on the nearly ready airplane. Strange things were happening, like flaps extending when only light switches were activated. And warning lights failed to activate when systems were turned off. Those could be safety-of-flight problems if not fixed.
How could that have happened? What was the true extent of the problem? How and when can it be fixed? And what could be done to make sure it didn't happen again? This was a problem that demanded personal attention. I called my secretary to make immediate flight reservations for me to travel. She was on the phone to the airlines even before I'd finished talking to Tom.
"Tom," I began, "I'll get our contracting officer to put an immediate Stop Work Order through to the company until we can sort this mess out. I'll catch the next flight out. Please meet me when I arrive. Okay?"
My next stop was down the hall to my boss's office to give him the bad news. He agreed that I should head out west as soon as possible. And in the mean time he quickly got on the telephone to the manufacturer's senior management.
I landed on the coast in a matter of hours. The major met me at the airport and we drove to the manufacturer's plant so that he could explain in detail and show me what had actually happened and what the manufacturer was planning to do about it. I also had to know how many airplanes were really affected. Was it just the one? ... that first production version? Or were others down the line likely to be facing the same serious and costly problem?
The clues began to fall into a clear pattern as we gathered more information. It seems that our military airplanes used heavier gauge wiring for all sorts of systems throughout the vehicle, heavier than comparable civilian craft normally used. The electrical wiring crews had failed to set their hand-crimping tools to allow for the larger diameter wires, causing the squeezing upon wire ends and connector pins to be excessive and wires were badly weakened. It turned out that hundreds of connectors pins and thousands of wires were over-crimped and on the verge of failing at the slightest vibration or pull.
Where crimping tool settings would have been perfectly acceptable on the production civil airplanes, it was a serious problem for our military models. Yet when the supervisor of the wiring shop was confronted with the specifics of the problem and the actual cause, his first reaction was to declare that he'd been building aircraft wiring harnesses for 25 years and knew a lot more about it than my major did. He practically chased us out of his domain.
The company's management was less belligerent, but initially remained defensive. However, the evidence was overwhelming and soon they had to accept the findings. To their eventual credit, the manufacturer accepted full responsibility for the problem and quickly undertook a crash effort to make things right. Fortunately for them, there had been allowances for extra wire lengths (pigtails) to permit them to cut off the faulty connectors and still be able to use the wire bundles when replacement ones were installed. They applied a Herculean effort to diagnose, analyze and remedy the problem.
Thousands of man-hours were used to re-crimp all of the defective connectors and completely repair the problems. More hours were needed to check out all of the affected connectors and systems. And then even more effort was applied to train the teams of men and women working in the electrical wiring shops. They must be made fully aware of the wiring differences between production civil airplanes and the military ones. That problem must not arise again, for the company's reputation was at stake, as well as lots of money.
The major who first alerted my office of the problem was totally surprised by what the contractor had done. It was a done-of-a-kind snafu, a typical failure of internal communications within the manufacturer's organization. The military products side of the company had failed to emphasize to the civil products side that military planes are different.
Readers might realistically ask why didn't the military simply specify the same wiring standards as those used for years on civil airplanes? At first glance that would seem an obvious way to preclude such problems. The reason that military wires had to be heavier than those used on civilian airplanes was two-fold. Firstly, military airplanes could be subjected to environments that civil versions would likely never see. Among them were nuclear electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) effects in the event of war. And secondly, government engineers had always specified heavier duty wiring. Military specifications were just that way.
Well, the manufacturer did manage to fix the one bad airplane, inspect all the others down the production line and preclude the problem from affecting other. And they got the bad wiring connectors fixed in time for the airplane to make its scheduled roll-out and first flight dates. All three factors of defense contracting were satisfied, namely performance, costs and schedule, though the cost factor was one the contractor had to absorb and not the taxpayer.
The manufacturer and the airplane are intentionally NOT identified by your author because they would surely sue me even now if named, despite the fact that this actually happened. Aerospace companies have far deeper pockets than your author and paying lawyers is the last thing on my priority list.