Fly-by-wire Italian bird.

The Aermacchi M346 advanced jet trainer executed its first flight under full authority of the company's newly-developed fly-by-wire flight control system. The second prototype of the M346 was used for this flight, which was aimed at validating the accuracy of the fly-by-wire control architecture and to evaluate the air-worthiness of the baseline configuration of the aircraft. Aermacchi announced that the company expects to have the M346 in its initial operational readiness state as early as the end-of-year 2006.

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