Are these tinned copper or aluminum? Because I'm going to be twisting/soldering them and that's important to me.
Hard to tell, might be aluminium - at least the cut on the red looks like it.
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Fire. Cu will let off green, Al will not make an effect (white to red).
You could also judge the stiffness of the strands. Both Al and Cu are flexible, but Al is stiffer and will bend a few times before breaking, where Cu is very easy to bend and will bend many times without breaking.
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Probably 99% of wire is copper so I'd just try soldering it.
...I've worked in electronics for decades and I'm not sure I've ever actually seen aluminum wire! I know it exists... For a time they were wiring homes with it and you can buy CCA (copper clad aluminum) speaker wire but it's not that common.
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CCA is also common in cheap and crappy ethernet cables.
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Looks like aluminium to me, although the photo isn't clear so I can't be sure.
Try soldering it, copper is easy to solder, aluminium pretty much impossible.
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Now I just stripped the wire further, it turned out to be copper.
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Years ago I bought a spool of 4 conductor stranded insulated wire from Boeing Surplus. Used in several projects, but ALWAYS screw connections. Last summer I needed to use some of that wire and needed to solder the connections. No success. Turns out the strands were stainless steel!
To the OP, where did the wire come from?
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Why steel?
In a plane I can understand aluminium. But steel is not the best conductor and pretty heavy...
Who can know? Not everything built by the old Boeing went into an airplane. Most of the cost to build an airplane goes into tooling, test fixtures, and payroll! Of course, they no longer build airplanes, just assemble them. That is why they are in so much trouble today.
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