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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?
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."
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.