Boeing is getting creative in its effort to build in-flight Wi-Fi systems.

Boeing is getting creative in its effort to build in-flight Wi-Fi systems. Rather than asking real people to sit on test planes for hours, the company is replacing them with sacks of potatoes.

The vegetables' interactions with radio wave signals mimic those in the human body. The result is Project SPUDS (Synthetic Personnel Using Dielectric Substitution).

Boeing said it created a new process for measuring signal quality that adapts a lab approach to a large airplane. As a result, something that previously took weeks to complete can be done in hours.

A signal can change with the shift of a passenger or the passing of a drink cart, but Boeing's new testing process identifies strong and weak signal areas and balances them with some adjustments. Older tests couldn't account for shifting signals.

"Every day we work to ensure that Boeing passengers are travelling on the safest and most advanced airplanes in the world," Boeing Test & Evaluation Vice President Dennis O'Donoghue said in a statement. "This is a perfect example of how our innovations in safety can make the entire flying experience better."

Much of the engineers' testing was conducted on the ground, with the airplane seats filled with 20,000 pounds of potatoes as human stand-ins.

To get a closer look at Boeing's work, watch the video below.