If you're flying somewhere this holiday season, you could be on a plane that offers Wi-Fi.
And a good Wi-Fi connection on a plane flying 500 miles per hour at 35,000 feet was a particularly hard tech problem to solve, say the Boeing engineers who solved it.
Packing a lot of people in a small space can interfere with radio signals like Wi-Fi. That leads to hot and cold reception spots on the plane, which means some passengers get great connections and others don't. It also has safety implications: You don't want Wi-Fi signals to bounce around and mess up the plane's instrumentation.
Engineers at Boeing thought up a way to fix the issue. But to test it they would need to fill a plane with people and make them sit there for days.
That's where the potatoes came it. It turns out that a sack of potatoes acts a lot like a person, at least as far as wireless signals are concerned. Instead of hiring people, the engineers filled all the seats of an old plane with sacks of potatoes—some 20,000 pounds in all.
The potatoes were content to sit quietly. They didn't need lunch breaks or bathroom breaks. What would have taken two weeks of testing with people took only 10 hours with the potatoes. (Update: A Boeing engineer tells us that they did keep the potatoes on board for a couple more weeks of tests, too.)
So next time you're watching Netflix on an airplane, thank a French fry.
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