US 2010/0060050 A1Published application

Wirelessly controllable electrical functional unit for an aircraft

AssigneeLufthansa Technik AG

InventorAndrew Muirhead

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Abstract

An aircraft includes interchangeable, wirelessly controllable electrical or electronic functional units provided for use by passengers and associated with a seat or group of seats. The aircraft further includes installation sites for the functional units, each installation site being associated with one seat or a group of seats. The functional units are removable such that they can be installed and uninstalled in the installation sites or replaced during maintenance work without forfeiting the operational approval of the aircraft. Each functional unit includes an RFID reader operating in a contactless manner to identify the installation site of the functional unit and a device for the wireless transmission of the identified installation site to a database of the aircraft. An RFID tag is associated with each installation site and contains information readable by the RFID reader to identify the associated seat or group of seats.

Claims6

Dependent claims

An aircraft, comprising:

a plurality of wirelessly controllable electrical or electronic functional units configured to be interchangeable with one another and for use by passengers, and associated with a seat or a group of seats;
and
a plurality of installation locations for the plurality of functional units, each installation location being associated with a seat or a group of seats, wherein:
the functional units are removable such that they can be installed and removed or replaced without cancellation of an operating clearance of the aircraft during maintenance work,
each functional unit comprises (i) an RFID reader configured to operate in a non-contacting manner to identify an installation location of the functional unit and (ii) a device configured to wirelessly transmit the identified installation location for storage in a database in the aircraft, and
each installation location has an associated RFID tag encoding information which can be read by an RFID reader of a functional unit and which identifies the associated seat or the group of seats.

3 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.