Fly-by-Wire
FBW
In aviation, a system that replaces the conventional manual flight controls of an aircraft with an electronic interface.
Origin
Early experiments with electronic flight controls date to the 1930s and 1940s, but the breakthrough came on May 25, 1972, when NASA test pilot Gary Krier flew a modified F-8 Crusader at Edwards Air Force Base — the first purely digital fly-by-wire flight, using a reprogrammed Apollo guidance computer. The F-16 Fighting Falcon became the first production combat aircraft with full digital fly-by-wire in the 1970s, and the Airbus A320 brought the technology to commercial aviation in 1988.
Everyday Use
When a modern airline pilot pushes the control stick, no cable physically moves the wing flaps — instead, electronic signals tell computers what the pilot wants, and the computers move the control surfaces. This lets engineers design aircraft that would be impossible to fly manually, since the computer can make thousands of tiny corrections per second that no human hand could match.