Sub-system
In a fly-by-wire aircraft the pilot's controls are inputs to a computer, not a mechanical linkage to the control surfaces. That allows envelope protection, lighter structures and consistent handling across a fleet — and it makes the computing system a life-critical component.
In one sentence
Fly-by-wire is a flight control architecture in which pilot inputs are read by redundant computers that command electrically signalled actuators, rather than moving control surfaces through mechanical linkages.
The benefits are substantial. Removing cables and pushrods saves weight. The computer can shape the aircraft's response so that different types in a family handle identically, which shortens pilot training. And it can enforce limits — angle of attack, load factor, bank angle — that keep the aircraft inside its safe envelope regardless of input.
The cost is that a failure of the control system is a failure of the aircraft. The answer is redundancy of a specific kind: multiple channels that are not merely duplicated but deliberately different, so that a design error in one implementation is not present in the others.
Duplicating a computer protects against a component failing. It does not protect against a design or software error, which would be identical in both copies. So critical systems use channels built with different processors, different software written by different teams from the same requirements, and sometimes different suppliers — so that a systematic error does not take every channel at once.
Channels compute continuously and compare results. A channel that disagrees with the others, or fails its own monitoring, is removed from control and the system continues on the remainder, degrading through defined control laws as capability is lost. The aircraft is designed to remain flyable in the most degraded law, which is what makes the architecture acceptable.
Manufacturers differ on whether the computer should hard-limit what a pilot can command or allow it with increasing resistance. Both are certified and both have arguments behind them. It is one of the few places in aircraft design where two mature approaches persist because the disagreement is about crew philosophy rather than engineering.
1 of these is marked as a chokepoint: a handful of qualified suppliers, a multi-year lead time, or a single geography.
Genuine dissimilarity requires more than one qualified processor family and more than one qualified toolchain to remain available.
Semiconductor IPSoftware for the most critical functions is developed and verified to the highest assurance level, and the evidence is the deliverable.
Type certificationCommands are useless without redundant actuation and redundant power to move the surfaces.
Landing gear and actuationControl laws are computed from measured airspeed, angle of attack and attitude; when those sources disagree or fail the system degrades to a simpler law, which is exactly the condition the architecture is built to survive.
Cockpit avionicsOther pages in this map that name Fly-by-wire as something they cannot do without.
What each company supplies at this step, and — where a public figure exists — its share of this specific market — with what that share measures, the period it covers and who published it. Some rows also show the company’s own reported revenue for the segment covering this step, which is a different thing: it says how much this business matters to that company, not how much of the market it holds. Not a ranking and not a recommendation.
Supplies flight control computers, actuation and avionics through Collins Aerospace.
Supplies flight control, navigation and aircraft management systems.
Supplies primary flight control actuation systems.
Supplies flight control and avionics systems for commercial aircraft.
Supplies flight control computers and the inertial systems the control laws are fed from.
Supplies flight control electronics and actuation across both civil and military programmes.
Supplies the hydraulic and electro-hydraulic actuation the commands are finally executed by.
Supplies actuation and control hardware on both the airframe and the engine side of the same loop.
Whether more integrated modular avionics reduces the number of separate line-replaceable units.
Whether certification frameworks adapt to allow learned components in non-critical functions.
Whether obsolescence of qualified processors forces architecture changes across the fleet.
Each page explains one technology in plain language, states what it depends on, and names companies by what they supply at that step. Company roles are described qualitatively and deliberately carry no market shares, revenue figures or rankings — those change faster than an explainer can, and a stale number is worse than none. Ticker links point at company pages on this site and are provided for reference only.
Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or a forecast. A company named on a page about a technology is not thereby a good investment, and the chokepoints described are structural facts about supply chains rather than predictions about prices. Technology moves; where a page describes something as unresolved or in development, that was true when it was written.
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