Since the publication of the first edition of this book there have been some very costly system failures, which could have been prevented with a better knowledge of electrical contact phenomena. I will give two examples. The first is an electrical connector that supplied power to the “Main Fuel Shut-off Valve” in the F-16 fighter airplane. This connector used tin plated pins plugged into gold plated sockets. As will be briefly discussed in Chapter 3, the failure of this combination from fretting corrosion in the aircraft’s vibration environment caused the fuel to stop flowing to the jet engines. Several F-16 crashes have been attributed to this connector failure with a subsequent cost of over $100 M. In hindsight ...
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