*** Posted by Rapier ***
[Can you tell me how this works?]

Hi Tiger,

I will tell you what I know. Modern jet's use the fly-by-wire system for many reasons, it has a number of advantages. Firstly remember the old planes with levers to control the surfaces, well as planes got faster you needed a stronger arm. Imagine going at Mach 1.5 and pulling back on the stick, you would need to do it with both hands. It's all controlled by a number of relitively powerful computers, I think the F-16 has 4 or 5 but I may be wrong, basically the computers keep the plane stable in the air. If you took these computers off an F16 the plane would do some strange things because the F-16 was designed to be unstable. These computers monitor the stick inputs from the pilot and give the pilot the reponse he/she need's. The computers send this data to the hydrollic actuators and the necessary changes are made to the control surfaces. It's a simple idea which had many problems at first with the computers and other things, but you can find out more info by looking a aircraft crashes on the net. Also an important note to make is that the components used in a fly-by-wire system have to sustain a high amount of G, heat, cold and other variables for obvious reasons, but the computers all help each other out so if one fails the other is able to take over as though nothing happened.

Rapier