Fly-By-Wire

Fly-by-wire is an aircraft flight control system that replaces the mechanical cables, pushrods and hydraulic lines running from the pilot's controls to the control surfaces with electronic wiring, converting the pilot's control movements into electronic signals that a computer interprets before commanding the actuators that move the surfaces. Early experiments with electrically actuated flight controls date to the 1930s, when the Soviet Tupolev ANT-20 used servo-electric control surfaces in place of long mechanical runs, and to 1941, when an engineer at Siemens in Germany built and tested a fully electronic control system for the Heinkel He 111. The Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow, first flown in 1958, was the first non-experimental aircraft designed from the outset around a fly-by-wire system, and the North American A-5 Vigilante, entering service the same year, became the first operational fly-by-wire aircraft, using solid-state electronics with built-in redundancy. NASA's modified F-8 Crusader became the first digital fly-by-wire aircraft with no mechanical backup in 1972, the Airbus A320 became the first mass-produced airliner with digital fly-by-wire controls when it launched in 1988, and Boeing adopted the technology for the 777 in 1994.