All Dr. Furse is describing is a faster more accurate circuit breaker. AA is grounding aircraft to re-route and re-secure wiring in order to prevent a wiring problem from happening in the first place.

AA's problem IS that they failed to secure wiring according to tech specifications the first time. The Doctor is describing a solution to an actual possible fault unrelated to AA's current woes. It appears AA took a maintenance short-cut much like Southwest did recently but the FAA has put the black hats back on is is spanking these airlines to regain some lost public confidence.

..on Fox. Had an "expert" that said the whole mess started when a politician grilled the FAA saying they were too cozy with the airlines and not performing enough inspections. The FAA came back and said, 'you want inspections, we'll give you inspections!' Seems this inter fighting will cost us all. But I can hardly afford to drive right now, let alone fly anywhere.

well as i am dr. furse's son i am pretty familiar with the work my mom is doing. No the research is not aimed at the reason the FAA has grounded all those planes but is aimed at something that could potentially ground more planes in the future. It would prevent airlines having to ground airplanes for days while opening every panel looking for a broken wire in the 100+ miles of wiring. instead It would just pop up a light or something and say "this is wrong or about to go wrong and this is where it is located" so that the problem could be fixed in a matter of minutes, say while people are boarding the airplane, rather than having to ground the airplane for days trying to find the broken wire. It is a revolutionary breakthrough and should make things easier on everybody.

I can see you are thinking about this problem! Good thing.

First, how does this technology apply to American Airlines? Unfortunately, it doesn't TODAY. But in the near future, it will be used to locate the intermittent faults that resulted in the engineering change order in the first place ... thus keeping passengers safer AND making the maintenance on those faults much, much faster. Second, by chance (and it really is by chance) we are presenting new research at the Aging Aircraft Conference next week that shows how this method MAY be able to detect missing, loose, or broken clamps as well as wires that are vibrating against metal structures (thus being likely to chafe and fray). More information here: http://www.agingaircraft2008.com/

You can find out more technical information on the method here:
http://www.ece.utah.edu/~cfurse/Center%20of%20Excellence/wiring.htm

Thank you for your comments, and I hope that you never need this technology! May all of your cables remain fault-free.