Aviation Insulation

Lightweight corrosion-mitigating blankets will now be standard equipment.

At the end of last month a Cocoon team was on-site at Boeing in Philadelphia, with our customer the U.S. Army, to verify installation of the first ITAB on Block II Chinooks.

The number of ways the Improved Thermal Acoustic Blanket (ITAB) serves warfighters is surprisingly high. Of course, it offers improved thermal and acoustic conditions inside the aircraft, but that’s just for starters.

Over the years various weight-reduction strategies have been either tried or considered to make Chinook helicopters lighter - everything from thinner coatings to hollowed-out fittings.

Thanks to breakthrough technology that prevents moisture build-up against the airframe, a Chinook outfitted with the ITAB will have dramatically less downtime due to corrosion.

If you’ve spent time on a Chinook, you’ve most likely experienced the sagging blanket problem - blankets that have pulled free of the airframe and sag from the ceiling and side panels.

Making Cocoon’s ITAB lightweight, air-permeable, hydrophobic, and oleophobic took years of painstaking R&D, but the end result hasn’t just modernized aviation blankets, it’s revolutionized them.

Making a high-performance aviation blanket that’s lightweight is difficult enough. But the real challenge is to keep it from gaining weight over time.

Cocoon’s Improved Thermal Acoustic Blanket (ITAB) for the CH-47 manages to combine properties that on the surface seem incompatible. It took years of R&D, but thanks to a lot of trial and error, and some highly technical new textiles, we were able to make possible what at first seemed impossible.

Having spent years getting lamination right, we know first-hand how challenging it is. We tried over 150 different iterations before landing on the right combination of elements for our aviation blanket.