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Fly-by-Wireless Plane Takes to the Sky
galactic_grub writes to tell us that 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."
The developer says:
I think that qualifies for understatement of the year.
Indiscriminate jamming isn't difficult. I used to hang out with a ham operator so old he had a 4-digit license. The guy had leydon jars made from all manner of old glass containers. He used to cackle with glee after applying the juice for a half-minute or so, then brag about how he had knocked out every TV and radio within a mile. I don't know about the range, but he sure managed to kill the TV and radio in his house by doing that. The point is that relying on wireless anything to stand between me and a flying machine suddenly dropping out of the sky strikes me (bad pun, I know) as a tad foolish.
Now, for deployment of cheaper, small drones in war zones against unsophisticated opponents, this might be a good strategy for making things more affordable. But for anything we might conceive of, today, as an "airplane," I just don't see it. I hope they get the problems worked out. That's what research is for and some really neat things might result. But my first reaction is pretty negative; it's just a weird idea. And it's posted right above a story on "Wireless Security Attacks and Defenses," fer Chrissakes!
Am I being too shortsighted, here?
This could be useful for combat aircraft, as you don't have to worry about losing control of a flap or other system because the cable was severed by enemy fire.
Also, with combat aircraft, you might be able to shield the interior of the aircraft such that it would be immune to jamming. That might be necessary anyway to prevent signal leakage that might give away the aircraft's location, either defeating stealth advanatages or allowing for another type of weapons lock.
I really don't think that this is much of anything new. There's no reason why this couldn't have been done 20 years ago, or probably 50 years ago, had someone been sufficently motivated. You could do it with the same sort of PCM systems that are used in radio-controlled models, if all you wanted was controls.
But there's a reason why nobody has done this, and I think that's because it just seems like a really bad idea. There's no safe failure mode for a system like this. If the controls stop working, bad things happen. The only safe way to work around the interference issues would be to have wired backup controls, and at that point you've made the wireless system redundant anyway, because it's only advantageous if you can eliminate the wires.
A plane is always going to have some sort of mechanical connection between all of its parts (otherwise it wouldn't be a "plane," it would just be a collection of stuff moving in the same direction through the air), so I can't imagine that routing wires is really that difficult a proposition.
The only interesting application that I can think of this is perhaps a "semi-wireless" system. If your plane has a lot of metallic parts, maybe you could use the body as a single control wire to tie everything together. You use RF modulators, but rather than transmitting through the air, you just couple the transmitting and receiving antennas directly to contiguous metallic parts on the plane. I think that most of the metal parts on planes are bonded together anyway, to prevent static buildup, to this might be practical. In this case, the signal from the transmitter also attached to the same piece of metal elsewhere in the plane would be so much stronger than the signal from an external transmitter, interference might not be quite so much of a problem.
Still, I'm not sure I'd want to trust my life to it. I guess people probably said that about fly-by-wire originally, or by fly-by-hydraulic when it replaced steel cables, but there are generally good reasons why those transitions are made. I don't see a compelling reason for this.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
...will come when a terrorist simply runs some script from his modified PDA/cellphone effectively blocking all inter-plane communication. Check out the wiki on Bluetooth for some glaring security issues already associated with bluetooth. What I'm curious about though is their supposed backup system. Are they going to end up installing old-fashioned wires as a backup and completely negate the weight savings of the bluetooth?
"By the same logic, if he has no good reason for what he says, he is just making noise and we need pay him no attention.
You can't jam a signal inside a tin can from outside it.
Any jammer would have to be inside the plane. So, NO, you can't hijack/crash this from the ground.
The hijacker would have to be on the plane, with his equipment.
You still need to distribute power to wherever it's needed to both power the device you're controlling and power the wireless equipment, you're only removing a piece of control cable and replacing it with the electronics necessary to implement wireless connectivity in a reliable, redundant manner. Seems that would increase power requirements, what power consumer is being removed? Or are they planning on putting heavy batteries at each control site?
You could pick up the same weight savings (if any) by simply passing RF over the power cables (ala X-10, but made robust), and have more secure/robust communications than with wireless.
This just seems like a dumb idea.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"XM radio... Great stuff, love what it offers, but I've NEVER gone an entire day without some interruption of signa."
:)
Case in point, but I wasn't aware that you could post to slashdot using XM radio.
"garage doors. It's not as bad these days, but our garage door would spontaneously open and close when aircraft were near."
I suppose that's what you get when you live in an airport hangar
Seriously, though, this is just a proof that it COULD be done, not that it should be. My feeling is that any control system needs to be hard-wired, but all the fluff could be wireless (as AKAImBatman noted, inflight entertainment systems for example).
The big problem with practicality I see is that you've got to wire for power to the mechanicals anyway, so there's not much advantage gained by not running optic along with it -- you already need space for the conduit.
Plus all the hackability and dependability issues.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I don't even think drive by wire systems have been approved for braking or steering in cars yet. They all have to have a direct link in case the power assist features fail.
A weekend news story here in New England brought out the importance of this in aircraft: It seems that Senator Ted Kennedy was flying back from a speaking engagement in western Massachusetts, when the plane (a 6-seater) was hit by lightning. It knocked out the plane's electronics. The pilot safely landed it at an airport near Hartford, where Kennedy spent the night.
If the plane's controls had been all electronic, we'd probably now be missing yet another Kennedy.
This does make one wonder how resistant the big jets really are to lightning. They may look big to a mere human, but they're pretty small compared to a thunderstorm.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I doubt the actual steering controls of an airliner will ever be wireless. But I can envision many parts of the avionics system being wireless. If the air speed indicator, for instance, gets jammed, the airplane isn't going to suddenly drop out of the sky, though the crew may have to manually take over control of the aircraft. Things of that nature seem like a decent place to use wireless technology if it matures to the point where failure rates are along the same order of magnitude as their wired counterparts.
What happens when a bunch of planes are sitting on the tarmac waiting to take off? Are they all going to confuse each other (wirelessly)? Or is there some fancy signal hopping that the internal components do to avoid interference? That would be annoying if plane #8's jets reacted to plane #1's take-off, rammed plane #7 from the rear, and plane #1's engines mistakenly shut down due to plane #7's collision alarms... could be a chain reaction of yuckiness and fire...
Of course, it would be killer fun for a terrorist to bring some kind of jamming device onboard to disable the whole plane.
Sadly, the worst part would be waiting for the TSA to verify that your electric shaver wasn't said jamming device... they already treat laptops like dirty bombs...
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
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Not only that, but modest RF signals around carbon fiber can induce electrical currents that can cause galvanic corrosion on metals that might be in contact with the carbon fiber. Carbon fiber and Aluminum do not play together nicely, most especially, and I hear that it's not too friendly on Titanium. It's a Good Thing there are special primers that solve that problem. There have been a few accidents with bicycles constructed with carbon fiber and aluminum, where the joint between the two erodes to the point where the whole thing falls apart... And a few riders have been seriously hurt because of it.
If there are any hobby guys messing around with CF and metal composite airframes, it would be a very good idea to know what's going on electrically, and how their materials react with eachother!
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
This can be useful for military application. In the past, flight controls were mechanically linked or fire by wire, which means they all have some wire/cable/shaft..etc running through the plane and were subjected to damage especially in combat situations. While they usually have multiple backup systems, there have been cases that there were multiple failures due to enemy fire before. I can see the benefit of this wireless system can be use as a backup system.
I have spent the last 5 months trying to find a shorted wire in my airplane. A bundle of cables from the main circuit breakers had chafed against the metal frame holding the radios, and shorted out, welding together two of the wires, causing the wing flaps to become inoperative. Luckily, the original failure happened while the aircraft was still on the ground. Had this occurred in flight, it could have been a very serious problem.
;-) Wires will probably always be required for delivering power, but for instrumentation and control, IMHO it is worth pursuing.
My airplane is a relatively simple two-seat, single engine, with only one comm and one nav radio and basic instruments. Yet behind the panel are over 200 individual wires, grouped and routed in various bundles. Some of the wires carry as much as 30 amps at 28 volts. Every single one has its own unique 5-character alphanumeric identifying code printed at regular intervals along its length.
It's a challenge to envision all of that being replaced by a wireless network, but I can certainly see the appeal
Back in 2004 when I independently came up with this concept for accident-resistant spacecraft, the complete system was:
"I've been looking at the concept of avoiding almost all hydraulic actuators in favor of self-contained high power electric actuators, so you don't have to have all of the overhead of hydraulic line temperature regulation, you don't have the risk of hydraulic leaks making you lose all control. You can scatter the power supply throughout the craft in proportionally small batteries connected by surge protected circuit breakers, so that if one mechanical part of the craft fails, the others continue to work. Combined with wireless networking, you could even have debris run straight through 90% of your wing at the fuselage connection, and as long as everything remains structurally sound (which a hot-frame titanium design would certainly help with), you still retain control of the wing's control surfaces."
That is to say:
A) Eliminating wires is more than a weight savings: it's a safety feature. While aircraft aren't subject to the kind of extremes that spacecraft are, debris strikes or corrosion can damage wiring. It's easy to have half a dozen backup transmitters, but try to do that with wiring, and you won't like the results.
B) It reduces maintenence. Have you ever looked at the wiring of an aircraft?
C) It makes aircraft closer to "plug and play", design-wise (although you'll still have to recertify the craft)
D) The issue of providing power is to use "grid" power. That is to say, you distribute electrical generation and storage capacity as much as possible throughout the craft so that parts remain powered (at least somewhat) even if their power lines get cut. In an airplane, where your power comes from your engines, you'd have one to four generators and as many batteries as you want.
The ultimate goal would be to have an aircraft that won't crash through anything less than catastrophic structural failure.
I tore these out of your symbol, and they turned into paper.