If you removed all the wires from a widebody passenger jet and strung them end-to-end, you could connect St. Louis to Chicago or London to Amsterdam, distances of approximately 500 kilometers. If you rolled these 100,000 wires into a ball with the harnesses that hold them to the aircraft structure and put the ball on a scale, it would tip to nearly 7,400 kilograms or about 3 percent of the aircraft's weight. First to go would be wiring for non-avionics functions, such as control of cabin lighting and passenger audio-video equipment or devices gathering routine health-management data from around the plane. Next might be safety-related wiring linked to smoke detectors, emergency lighting, cabin-pressure sensing and avionics, and eventually even commands that move the plane's flight-control surfaces.