Look Mom, No Wires

Ken McIver, head of TRW Lucas Aerospace, has a vision of the all-electric airplane where the hydraulics are replaced by wires.
Mike Stacey, chief executive of Meggitt PLC and former MD of Lucas Aerospace U.K., would like to take those wires out and replace them with -- well, new technology.

Not all the wires, perhaps, but enough to save several thousand pounds in weight on a typical airliner.

Meggitt's labs are currently working on sensors imbued with intelligence so they can contact the computer only when necessary. Today, the computer constantly interrogates each sensor with the question going in one wire and the reply along another, resulting in thousands of circuits and wires.

Meggitt is taking two approaches: by linking each sensor to its neighbor and allowing it to "talk" in strict sequence, many sensors can be strung along a one-wire string.

A second approach involves the sensors reporting back by "secure radio" that would be resistant to electromagnetic interference.
Stacey won't say much about these programs. But he allows Meggitt is working on them with one U.S. company, and that one U.S. airframer, that he declined to identify, is "interested."

By John Morris