"We're confident the public will benefit from this valuable partnership between NASA and Boeing," said Shin. During the flight tests, NASA engineer Roy Roper operates ASTAR on a laptop in the rear of the aircraft.

As a second aircraft flies in front of the ecoDemonstrator 787, ASTAR computes and displays the speed required to follow safely behind. Roper then communicates those speed commands to the ecoDemonstrator 787 pilots. "NASA has tested ASTAR in laboratory simulations, but this flight test on board the ecoDemonstrator 787 gave us the chance to see how well it works in a real-life flight environment," said Will Johnson, a project chief engineer at NASA's Langley Research Centre in Hampton, Virginia.

The NASA team will apply the lessons learned from the flight test programme to improve the software and then begin development of actual flight hardware for further testing and eventual certification for use.

The ASTAR experiment is the first of several NASA tests flying aboard the ecoDemonstrator Test Airplanes. During the spring and summer of 2015, the ecoDemonstrator 757 Test Airplane will host two NASA experiments.

The first involves using active flow control technologies on the aircraft's tail to determine if future tail designs can be altered to reduce drag. The second will test the effectiveness of coatings applied to the leading edge of a wing section to reduce turbulence-inducing buildup of insect residue.

READ MORE: Apple Mac Vs The Windows PC: What's The Difference? And How Is Microsoft Making Money From Its Arch Rival Google?