[Flight Deck | Flight Deck Innovations | Fly By Wire System]

The 777 represents Boeing's first attempt at a completely fly-by-wire commercial airplane. This technology has long been used in military planes and by Boeings competitor, Airbus Industrie. Boeing is hoping that by incorporating this new innovation into the 777, they will make this airplane the most technologically advanced on the market.

The fly-by-wire system replaces the steel cables used on earlier Boeing aircraft. In the fly-by-wire control system, the pilot's commands - made through the conventional control wheel and rudder pedals - are converted to electrical signals. These signals are then transmitted through computers and electrical wires to the plane's control surfaces. As a safety measure, Boeing has built in the ability for pilots to override the fly-by-wire system, giving the pilot the ultimate control over plane. Boeing also made the 777 look and feel like a conventional plane, so pilots would not have to re-learn how to fly using this new technology. This was the rationale behind Boeing's retention of the conventional control yoke rather than the sidestick controller (resembling a joystick) used on Airbus Industrie aircraft since the A310. Since most commercial pilots have spent all their flying life in planes in which forces felt through the hands and body combine with sights and sounds to give continual feedback on how things are going, designers of the fly-by-wire system attempted to give pilots this same feedback. If exploited to the maximum, fly-by-wire could replace all of these physiological cues by a series of figures and diagrams on a computer screen, but Boeing decided against this. They wanted to leave pilots to be "regularly required to use the seat of their pants as an aid to flying."

One feedback feature the Boeing 777 provides, called a "stickshaker" is a stall protection warning which causes the control columns to vibrate vigorously to warn the pilot if a stall was eminent (shown on right). In designing the fly-by-wire system Boeing built in so many safeguards and backups that it almost appeared that they were unsure of their design. For example, there are effectively nine computers that could run the fly-by-wire system alone. In addition, there is a battery backup on top of a primary backup to run the system should the power to the system be interrupted. Engineers also left some of the original cable system intact as another backup system. In other words, Boeing has attempted to counter Murphy's Law such that if anything can go wrong there is a backup!