DO-160 Section 25 is one of the environmental qualification tests defined in RTCA DO-160.
What DO-160 Section 25 Covers, and Why It Exists
Section 25 covers electrostatic discharge from human contact, a routine event on aircraft given low cabin humidity, synthetic carpets, vinyl seating, and plastic structures. The test applies to equipment and surfaces accessible during normal operation or maintenance, and it explicitly does not apply to connector pins. The immunity test applies 15,000-volt discharge pulses directed at human-contact locations, ten pulses at each location in positive polarity and ten in negative. Category A covers electronic equipment installed or operated during normal aircraft operation and maintenance, which describes most galley equipment with any electronic control or display.
The Typical Failure Pattern
Aviation maintenance literature on ESD consistently notes that a discharge from a potential as low as a few tens of volts can permanently damage sensitive circuits, and that ESD-related failures split between immediate hard failures and latent soft failures that only degrade reliability later, well after the discharge event is forgotten. That latency is what makes ESD genuinely hard to trace back to its cause without deliberate testing, the symptom and the cause are separated in time.
Why Touch-Heavy Galley Equipment Needs Attention Here
This section is squarely aimed at equipment crew and passengers physically interact with, and that’s a growing share of galley equipment as digital controls and touch displays replace mechanical interfaces. Every touch point on a unit operated dozens of times per flight, buttons, displays, latches, handles, is a real ESD exposure point, not a theoretical one. Identifying all of them, not just the obvious control panel, is the core of getting this right.
How to Mitigate This
- Identify every actual human-contact point, not just the control panel, latches and handles count too
- Remember connector pins are explicitly excluded from this test’s scope, don’t over-apply it there
- Watch for latent, intermittent failures in touch-heavy equipment as a possible ESD signature, not only outright component failure
Further reading: NTSB accident report archive.
How Eminent Helps: As galley equipment moves to touch panels and digital displays, every crew-contact point becomes an ESD exposure point, and the resulting failures are often latent and hard to trace. Identifying and protecting those points up front is part of the design work we do. See how we support galley insert programs.
