Fly-by-Wireless Plane Takes to the Sky

Engineers in Portugal have built and flown a plane with no wires or mechanical connections between the major systems, only a wireless network. From the article: "Tests flights carried out in Portugal have shown that the system works well. Cristina Santos, at Minho University in Portugal, who developed the plane, says the aim is primarily to reduce weight and power requirements. 'Also, if you do not have the cables then the system is much more flexible to changes,' she says.

Is it just me or is this the worst application for wireless ever? If my wlan at home goes down, it's not a problem. If a plane's wlan goes down, it may crash

It's not just you; this thing really gives a whole new meaning to 'system crash'...

While I'm all for new technology, planes fly quite happily with wires connecting things and they are much less likely to break. I can just picture a bunch of nerds building HERF guns trying to shoot them down.

I must admit though, it's still pretty cool and would have been very fun to build!

On this subject, you might be interested to know the Garmin G1000 glass cockpit system fitted to many light aircraft such as Cessna nowdays relies on Ethernet to link all the bits together, so they are already half-way there so to speak.

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Jeremy

Marlborough WiFi Project