Boeing filled a plane with 20,000lb in potatoes and the reason for why is actually genius

Boeing engineers once filled an entire plane with potatoes.

Not for food, and definitely not for a very strange in-flight meal service.

The sacks of potatoes were actually standing in for passengers.

And the reason behind it turned out to be surprisingly clever.

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Why Boeing filled a plane with 20,000 pounds of potatoes

Back in 2012, Boeing engineers were trying to solve a problem most travelers know well: patchy in-flight Wi-Fi.

Getting a signal to work consistently inside a metal tube packed with people is harder than it sounds. 

Wireless signals bounce around the cabin and change depending on where devices are sitting.

Even moving a laptop a few inches on your tray table can affect the connection.

“You want your laptop to work anywhere it’s located on your seat, but there can be significant signal changes just due to the location of the laptop,” Boeing engineer Dennis Lewis explained.

To understand exactly how signals behaved inside a packed plane, Boeing needed a cabin full of passengers.

The only problem was that the tests would take days, and asking hundreds of volunteers to sit perfectly still the entire time wasn’t exactly realistic.

So the engineers reached for something a little less demanding.

They filled the seats of a decommissioned aircraft with sacks containing 20,000 pounds of potatoes.

It turns out potatoes interact with radio signals in a surprisingly similar way to human bodies, meaning they absorb and reflect wireless signals almost the same way passengers do.

The experiment even had a fitting name: SPUDS, short for Synthetic Personnel Using Dielectric Substitution.

Did the potato experiment improve in-flight Wi-Fi?

Once the cabin was fully packed with potatoes, Boeing engineers ran connectivity tests across the aircraft.

Because the potatoes mimicked how real passengers affect signals, the team could measure exactly where in-flight Wi-Fi was strong and where it struggled.

That made it much easier to map weak spots throughout the cabin and adjust the placement of antennas and equipment.

The results helped improve onboard internet performance for aircraft like the Boeing 777, 747-8, and 787.

And the potatoes came with one major advantage over real passengers.

They never got bored.

Which meant they could sit there quietly for days while engineers gathered all the data they needed.

So next time the airplane Wi-Fi actually works, you might have a few sacks of potatoes to thank.

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