Aside for those few among us who like the excuse to be offline for a few hours, people love having the Internet when they travel. Wi-fi Internet, which already blankets many terminals, has started making its way into the airplanes. But in flight wireless is spotty at best, a problem Boeing has been working diligently to fix. And the company’s secret weapon on this quest? Potatoes.There are two ways airplane manufacturers bring the Internet to passengers in flight: by satellites, or by ground-based cellular networks. Satellite communications use an antenna on top of the plane to talk to a satellite in orbit, which in turn talks to a station on the ground that has a connection to the Internet. It's a long route; when you try to load a page with this system, the request goes from airplane antenna to satellite to ground station, back to satellite to airplane to laptop.Ground-based cellular networks are a little more direct. An antenna on the plane’s underside transmits and receives signals to and from ground-based towers – it’s basically like a cell phone network. And as providers erect more towers, the network available to overflying planes expands.That’s all well and good for getting the Internet to the plane, but getting the returned signal to the passenger is a different matter. Wireless signals bounce around in small spaces like airplanes, meaning some passengers just by luck get stronger signals than others. On the other hand, the information a passenger requests from the Internet might be on board but unable to reach him.Boeing has been working on fixing this problem. Based on small scale lab tests, the airplane manufacturer has developed state-of-the-art technology and ground-breaking statistical analysis that enable engineers to more efficiently measure a signal’s strength and propagation throughout an airplane. Having identified the signal, Boeing can balance and adjusting the system’s connectivity accordingly to give every seat stronger wi-fi.But that’s only half the problem. Signals also deviate randomly when passengers move around in airplanes, meaning the number of passengers on board and where they’re sitting has an equally large impact on in-flight signal strength. So Boeing needed a way to figure out just how passengers – specifically their physical bodies – interact with wireless signals bouncing around a plane. The difficulty being that engineers couldn’t have people sitting in the plane while they fiddled around with the Internet connection. We, quite frankly, wouldn’t have the patience to sit motionless for hours while engineers measure invisible signals.This is where the potatoes come in.It turns out that potatoes interact with electronic signals in a similar way to humans, making them a perfect analog for Boeing’s series of signal strength tests. The manufacturer filled the seats on a decommissioned plane with potatoes – 20,000 pounds of potatoes in sacks, to be exact. With its starchy, tuberous passengers in place, Boeing's engineers ran a series of tests to ensure that every spud-filled seat would get the strongest possible wi-fi signal without interfering with the airplanes electrical signals. There are things like radar altimeters on commercial airplanes, systems that measure the time it takes for a radio signal to reflect from the surface back to the aircraft to judge how high it is. Wi-fi won’t matter much to anyone if it disturbs this system or one that’s equally vital. But even the spuds aren’t in danger. For now at least, Boeing has done its potato test in an airplane parked safely on the ground.The potato-based testing worked. Boeing says this new test method allowed engineers to complete in 10 hours what would have taken over two weeks with previous methods. And the gathered data is helping the airplane manufacturer figure out exactly how to adjust and balance its onboard signals. The result will be better wi-fi coming to a flight near you, no matter where you’re seated. Hopefully with complementary fries or vodka.
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