To meet today’s increasingly tight safety demands and environmental restrictions, commercial aircraft must continually advance year after year. These planes use cutting edge technology to make them safer, more efficient, and more comfortable for passengers. Advancements include everything from more efficient engines and improved passenger environments to new and improved processes for completing flight-critical operations.

Deicing and anti-icing an aircraft’s wings (WAI) and engines (EAI), for example, is an essential operation that is continuously improved. Deicing is integral to maintaining proper flight characteristics of an aircraft, but keeping ice from forming on the wings and engines is often a losing battle during flight. High altitudes, fast speeds, and extremely cold temperatures make it easy for ice to form and leave engineers with limited options.

To combat ice build-up on their latest commercial passenger aircraft during flight, world-renowned aircraft manufacturer Boeing opted to use hot bleed air from the engines to heat the leading edge of each wing. To accomplish this, Boeing required not only specially-designed pressure switches to control the deicing system automatically but also a company that could design the switches and quickly produce them at a rate of 200 switches per month.

This is where Custom Control Sensors comes in.

From Eight Switches Per Aircraft to Four

At the request of Boeing’s Tier-1 Supplier for its de-icing system, CCS set to work and designed four unique switches for use on each wing of their new aircraft. Two of the four switches would be used to indicate when pressure is present within the deicing system and when to precisely open the bleed air valve. The other two switches were initially designed to be used as redundancies if one or both of the primary switches were to fail.

However, as Boeing was still tinkering with the specifications of their new aircraft, the requirements for the switches they needed continued to change. As a result, the aerospace company demanded CCS be able to create different iterations of each switch on the fly and without delay. CCS obliged and continued to provide prototype switches to assist Boeing in testing and design. Eventually, engineers from both companies landed on a final design that consisted of only two switches per wing with the redundancies removed.

How CCS Switches Decrease Overall Cost

This final design was only possible thanks to the durability and reliability of CCS switches. Through the creating and testing process, Boeing grew to trust not only the capabilities of CCS as a company and supplier but also the products CCS produces. Boeing realized CCS switches were of a much higher quality than they originally anticipated which allowed the engineers to eliminate the redundant switches.

Halving the number of switches helped to simplify the deicing system while significantly reducing overall cost. Furthermore, the universal casing used on all CCS switches allows for their internals to be swapped out at will without having to change the overall design of each switch. The universal housing further decreased Boeing’s total cost while allowing CCS to provide multiple iterations of each switch and meet the unusually high production rate.

Boeing has continued to use CCS switches on its passenger aircraft since this project took place. Boeing’s new 777X NGS uses CCS pressure switches within its fuel system to refill the plane’s fuel tanks with nitrogen as they are drained during flight. The process of filling the fuel tanks with non-combustible nitrogen instead of normal air dramatically reduces the risk of explosion by removing oxygen from the tank.

Background on Custom Control Sensors’ Experience in the Aerospace Industry

Custom Control Sensors has been developing switches and sensors for the aerospace industry for more than 60 years. Our extensive experience within this industry has given us the knowledge and the capabilities needed to meet ever-changing and increasingly complex designs and requirements for customers like Boeing. CCS offers research and development, prototyping, 3-D modeling, manufacturing, testing, quality control, complete build-to-specification design, and after-sales support capabilities for the Aerospace, Energy, Industrial, and Defense industries across the globe.

For more information on our products for the aerospace industry, take a look at our entire selection of pressure, temperature, and flow sensors and switches or contact us directly.