alt Hacker NewsI worked on military avionics in a previous life and all of the planes I worked on had miles of white wires. The reasons given to us were:
1. Cost savings when buying.
2. There are hundreds to thousands of wires in an aircraft, but there are NOT hundreds to thousands of different colors of wires (even if we allow for stripes, etc) that are readily distinguishable to an overworked airman hunched over in a dim, cramped avionics bay trying to fix a plane that needs to take off for a mission in an hour.
If you are lucky, the wires are numbered. But even if they are, you typically identify a wire by its connector pin and PRAY that the fault isn't a break somewhere back in the wiring harness.
I'd also mention that black lasermarked white wire has marvelous contrast, even in the dim, covered in dust. Black lasermarked (or god help you, heatstamped) wire on damn near any other colour, like one finds in automotive, is distinctly worse.
Yellow would be manageable, but the wrong shade of red, purple, green, or blue (wihch, when seperating systems by colour, would inevitably get used) would be shitty to work on