Even with virtual windows, I think knowing that I can't directly see outside would make me extremely claustrophobic, and I think a lot of people would feel similarly.
All in all this is a cool concept, but I don't think it will be executed well. What happens when my "window" inevitably breaks (as technology is apt to do) and the illusion of being able to see is broken? What about annoying dead pixels or color banding? I can't imagine the displays being used are very high quality.
I'd think it'd be a disaster if those screens were to malfunction mid-flight and all of the sudden people realized they were in a box with no way to see out. I'm sure that would cause at least one person per flight to have a panic/anxiety attack. It's similar to walking with your eyes closed, you start to panic after a few seconds because you can't see where you're going and lose your sense of positioning/direction/balance. I hate flying, I don't think I could manage to make it on a plane with no windows at all.
And yet, millions of people are able to handle tunnels everyday without incident.
Metro lines don't tend to have much visible outside them (if anything at all save for some flashing lights), and there are extended scenarios like the Channel Tunnel where passengers basically don't see anything for over 30 minutes.
> That's not to say the negative reaction of a small minority wouldn't be vastly increased
The main problem I see with this is that both the small minority and the large majority are locked together inside a tin can speeding through the stratosphere. I'd rather not find out how fast panic might propagate under such conditions.
I know a couple of claustrophobic people. It "doesn't matter" because they wouldn't be caught dead in such a location. If it's OK not to have these people on planes (and maybe when everything is accounted it is OK), you're right.
If they're claustrophobic enough to the point where they can't even be in that position, then how can they handle a plane as it stands, even with windows? It's not like you can break the window in case of emergencies, and if anything, it's reinforcing the fact that you're 30k feet in the air in a tiny sealed box.
I'm not claustrophobic, so I can't explain exactly, but I think the evidence of altitude actually counteracts this effect, rather than compounding it as you suggest. In general, we wouldn't expect psychological maladies to present in reasonable ways.
As a guy who gets anxiety on planes, it's because of the claustrophobia. In a tunnel, I am moving freely. In a plane, I'm stuck inside the plane for the duration of the flight, and I can barely move given the only moving you can do is to the lavatory and back.
Eh, I hate flying and I have a ton of anxiety. But when I'm on a train in a tunnel, theoretically I can't see anything and it doesn't bother me too much.
And your brain is wholly enclosed in a sphere anyway, which itself is part in your body, so you kind of spend your whole life encased in a tube with no way out! Thus, rationally proving that claustrophobia is a myth and anyone claiming to suffer from it is no more credible than a flat-earther!
I literally suffer from claustrophobia and agoraphobia you sarcastic nitwit
I'm trying to explain to you that a window with some clouds does not alleviate my claustrophobia. So, whether the windows are virtual or not make no difference to me, even if one malfunctions...
The train has window. In my experience tunnels are always lit a little bit and you can see the wall passing by. Also it's rare to stay in a tunnel for more than a few minutes.
Which is funny because I don't think I have a ton of anxiety but this was exactly what I was thinking. I was once stuck for a bit on a NYC Subway and I found it deeply deeply unsettling.
"I can't imagine the displays being used are very high quality" ??? if they provide the amount of savings outlined I doubt spending extra 200K on quality screens will be an issue
If they provide the savings outlined, those savings will be pocketed as profit. Productivity improvements don't mean employees get to work less, either.
> Productivity improvements don't mean employees get to work less, either.
The economics literature begs to differ, though it's not a 1:1, as the improvements are usually specific to an area of the market while the labor market is much less specific, which actually means that the benefits are less because they're dispersed over a wider group of people, marginally improving the lives of people who didn't even have productivity improvements in the work they do.
Don't know about Emirates, but Etihad had two cameras available to watch on the in-flight entertainment screen (IIRC that was on 777), and quality looked so poor it reminded me of the very first 640x480 webcam I had in early 2000's.
Although that's probably regulatory stuff. Most governments don't let arbitrary airtcaft do aerial topography-grade stuff, and companies err on the side of caution.
The idea might seem uncomfortable, but realize that on airplanes today most windows are closed for the majority of the flight and people seem perfectly alright with it.
“Majority” is not all. Even with a few windows still open you can still get the sense of the outside, and light shifts as the plane moves, etc. There’s a big difference between “majority” and “all”.
Emirates (subject of this thread) almost exclusively flies super long haul overnights. Their proposal wouldn’t work for the domestic 2-3 hr hops, but does work well for that 12 hour flight where one person trying to look outside wakes the whole cabin.
There may be some kind of step too far somewhere in the space of things that can be done for cheaper flights, but so far everything the airlines do that leads to paying less for a ticket has led to lots of grumbling and no shortage of sales :)
No windows in exchange for a discounted ticket; I think people will happily eat it up! If you sit in the middle of a row of ten seats (plus two aisles) the windows were just blobs of light in the distance anyway.
What do you think about few cameras streaming live from different points of the aircraft and the passengers having the possibility to switch between them, or between live and a geosynchronized prerecorded day or night flight with a clear sky ? Would be a perk for the middle aisle seats...
This is already the case on some flights. I know we had this on a KoreanAir A380 from LAX to Seoul a few years ago. The view was kind of underwhelming, for the most part.
> so far everything the airlines do that leads to paying less for a ticket has led to lots of grumbling and no shortage of sales :)
Customers have no real visibility into any of this, eg you're lucky to know what kind of aircraft will be flying a route let alone what interior configuration it will have (and all of that can and is regularly changed between booking and departure).
I'd gladly pay an extra $10 or $20 to fly with more legroom or a plane with windows, which would be a realistic reflection of what these cost carriers (10-20% extra), but these are major revenue centers for them. On the last flight I took, Delta wanted an extra $110 for an exit-row seat, on a flight that cost $165. That's just blatantly milking it. At time of departure, 5 of 6 seats were unfilled and they had to fill them with main-cabin passengers.
The only real control you have is over what carrier you fly with, and there are definitely people who will refuse to fly with budget carriers. By the time they are done nickel-and-diming you for having a carryon and everything, you end up in the same place anyway.
But even there, people only have a small degree of choice in carriers either. Delta is the vast majority of flights out of my airport (Wikipedia says 75%), I'd love to go with Alaska Airlines or someone but I don't really have a choice.
So, there's lots of reasons this isn't really an efficient market.
Really? Most of the time on flights the windows are shuttered anyways, most people open them during landing to watch it go down. I wouldn't be bothered in the slightest by lack of windows
I thought you were supposed to open them to let in light just in case you need to evacuate. Normalize your eyes so people can jump down the slide without delay of adjusting to the outside light and to be able to see inside the cabin without aux lighting.
How many times a year does that happen? Now how many times a year do you hear about shitty monitors? Hell, on Reddit alone I see 2 or 3 posts about bad monitors every day
Every time I'm on a night flight, everyone just puts their blinds down and goes to sleep. There's no mass hysteria. If you're in the economy section and not in the minority by a window you can't see anyway even when it's daylight.
But these will be on planes, meaning they will probably be engineered to hell and back. I'm sure they will almost never fail.
It's not like the software world, where we slap on a feature, do some mild testing, and maybe do a little bit more debugging when the user complains about it.
But this is the (web-)software equivalent of a positioning of a button using CSS. 1 pixel off? Good 'enuff. Have you never flown on a plane where the audio or USB port is broken? These parts are not mission critical, and "20% of the virtual windows are broken? Good 'enuff."
Non flight-critical stuff is not engineered to any super high standard. Consider the in-seat video displays, the fold-down tray tables, etc. I was once on a flight where the lavatory door wouldn't stay shut, and it kept banging open and closed every time the plane turned.
No one in this thread seemed to pick up on the mention in the article that they wanted to pipe in fiber optics and project. It sounds like a largely analog solution that would be unlikely to break.
No reason to believe that they would, I've been on multiple planes where it was possible to bring up different camera feeds of the plane on the screen in front of me. The coolest of these was filming the plane from the top of the tail wing so it almost looked like a video game feed.
I think this is an A380 feature, needed to accurately steer the thing on the ground. Other airframes of similar age may also have it, though I've been on several 787s and haven't seen anything quite as neat as what the A380s have.
JAL had it, too, on ORD-NRT. A member of the crew would switch to different cameras, presumably based on what there was to see (front landing gear view during takeoff, just clouds straight down during most of the flight, etc...). I haven't flown JAL in close to a decade, so I can't say if its planes still have this.
No windows at all = travel sickness, panic attacks, no spotting of fires, the issue with exits in emergency landings etc.
E.g. 80% fewer windows = none of the problems above. True the window seat is then mostly less desirable, but on a long haul, they see nothing for 99% of the journey anyway.
Endless clouds below, dark blue skies above, the occasional contrail of another plane on a slightly different route, the moon over the ocean, the stars, auroras, sunrises, sunsets, large ocean liners or cargo ships below, wind farms, mountains, cities, the Alps, the Grand Canyon, endless patterns of irrigation. The Earth is unfathomably beautiful from above.
Perhaps 100 windows at 10 kg per unit, so roughly one metric ton. The metal required to fill the holes will be quite light. LCD screens are light as well, but less so when you account for the long wires to drive them, plus other infrastructure. Still, you ought to be able to carry a few extra passengers by removing the windows.
No - they're not 'removing' windows, they're building the fuselage without them which eliminates the need for a lot of extra structural reinforcement. This is not just the weight of the windows we're talking about.
It's a fairly easy number to check: Freight aircraft don't have windows or window frames. What is the delta on their empty weight compared to a passenger version?
I'll speculate that a freight 747 is still fundamentally structurally a plane designed to have windows (with the correspondingly reinforced fuselage) but with minor tweaks.
I'd be very surprised if that's not the case. You'd need a plane that's designed from the ground up to not have windows in any configuration.
Not as much as you'd expect. It's easier and cheaper to get a design with windows (and their supporting structure), and not cut out the holes for the windows in the skin.
The resulting structure is going to be only marginally lighter, but also much more fatigue resistant. The savings would show up in the changed inspection intervals.
Offtopic: I found the article format quite hard to read. The mix of headings, bold, block quotes and embedded media made it feel very messy and I was never sure when the article was finished.
Windowless planes would be a useful step. If people can get used to not having windows then there's more scope to change the design of the aircraft, so something like Boeing's Blended Wing design[0] might have a chance of not failing before it gets off the ground.
The technology could also be useful for having a virtual window in tunnels, to make the experience a bit less claustrophobic. Particularly for something like a hyperloop carriage when there might not be room to move about.
Good point. Is the target still 90 seconds to evacuate the entire aircraft?
I can see how with the central compartments it could be more difficult to meet that sort of time constraint. It'll be interesting to follow how the engineers seek to create a design for evacuating in time.
It's a shame windows on the leading edge of the blended wing are not very practical. Maybe one day we'll be able to make the composite machinery switch to transparents where a window is supposed to be.
This would probably also allow for much larger windows.
> Not really, aviation expert Douglas Drury from the University of South Australia says.
Not a common need (thankfully) but windows also provide a way to look into plane as well, say in times of emergency or a hostage taking. That’s one of the reasons you’re required to open them when you take off and land.
I wonder if their answer to that is a live video feed of the inside of the plane to the tower.
> That’s one of the reasons you’re required to open them when you take off and land.
I fly pretty regularly in the US and am unaware of this rule, where have you encountered it? I've only ever heard crew request windows be closed to mitigate the greenhouse effect and keep the plane a bit cooler.
I don't fly that often anymore but this rule has been universal in USA and abroad for decades. I don't doubt there are some cabin crews that DGAF, but they are exceptions.
> That’s one of the reasons you’re required to open them when you take off and land.
I've heard this was more for the reason of passengers safety being able to see whats going on outside - i.e. engine smoke, pieces of wing coming off, etc to let the crew know and in an emergency landing being able to tell what is outside (fire, water, militant guerrillas)
For me, the biggest issue with “virtual windows“ would be the lack of parallax. It would be very jarring to not see the view change as you move relative to the window.
They could implement head tracking to solve this, but that breaks down as soon as more than one person need to look through the same window.
I don't think it would be a huge issue for the most part, simply because the parallax from your head movement is minimal due to the relatively long distance involved from the plane to the ground. Most of the parallax you'd experience in a plane would come from the plane's movement, which would be replicated due to the cameras' relative movement as well.
But the parallax is pretty huge from me to the window to the ground. If I lean forward, I can suddenly see a lot of ground I couldn't see before; if I lean back, I can see all the ground in front of the plane.
That said with some fairly simple optics you could give the "look" of parallax. There are a number of "3D like" lens solutions that go over high resolution screens to create different views at different angles, if they really wanted to go that way.
I'd say just make it look like you're going down a subway... passing trains and all!
Actually, the distance from the plane to distant objects exaggerates parallax. The closer an observer is to the window, the stronger the effect. Just like a really long lever.
Couldn’t believe I had to scroll down this far to find the real killer app for this. Even if a relatively upscale airline like Emirates won’t coat these with ads, what do you think a discount cattle hauler will do with this screen space if the concept catches on?
Maybe about five years ago I was on a flight where not only were there ads on a few of the overhead luggage bins, the stewards handed out little flyers to each passenger.
I can't remember which airline it was, though. I don't fly discount very often, so it's hard to pinpoint. It would have to have been American, United, or maybe JetBlue. I sleep as much as possible, even on short flights, so few are memorable.
I get this feeling that the displayed images just won't be the same, not the least because they'd just be flat images instead of what you see when you normally look out. As someone who regularly requests window seats this doesn't appeal to me in the least, but I don't fly Emirates so I guess it doesn't really matter. I suppose I might be in the minority, though, of people who love just staring out the window, especially on takeoff and descent.
Sadly, the scratches and distortion (esp. from the two layers of window) make this "highest resolution" a bit of a pipe-dream...
[Or: no, looking directly through optical system A is not guaranteed to have "higher resolution" (really, MTF) than looking at a display of a digital image captured through optical system B]
Yes, but what does make it through is actually there, in analogue, not interpreted. This is non-trivial levels of information being conveyed even through distorted glass that is more present than a digital image.
But really, that is only accessible for passengers in window seats and on day time flights. With Emirates, that is a small %age of the time! 2 out of 10 passengers per row, and windows have to be down overnight.
For this airline, a passengers' opportunity to gaze out a window is simply less.
Every emirates flight I've taken has included tail, nose and belly camera shots to screen right in front of me. Blurry, not the highest possible resolution, but a FAR more interesting perspective!
Not every experience that a window gives you can be replicated. As the plane banks over the bay, spotting your house or favorite park is probably never going to happen with cameras, nor being able to watch the ground crew work.
But for the bulk of the flight, the takeoff, the landing, man the external camera feeds are great. As a passenger, I'd gladly ditch the windows for better cameras, on pretty much any flight.
I always pay so I can pick seats, and I think I've had 2 out of 20 flights in the last 5 or so years where I was not sitting by a window.
Looking at the landscape through the screen would be like watching a live performance on your phone's screen (which is, surprise, a loooot of people do).
And people saying "What's the difference between a windowless plane and a plane where all the windows are shuttered, the people insisting on windows are stupid!" are... stupid. With a windowless plane I think my anxiety would cause claustrophobia. With a windowed plane I know I won't get that anxiety...
The only somewhat pleasant aspect of flying to me is that it's over relatively quickly. I'd rather take the train or boat, even if it takes several days. It's not always practical, so I do take a plane sometimes. You also get to see much more, and it's a lot better for the environment.
What about opening the window shades before flights land / take off ?
I thought it was for the firefighters to see inside during an emergency. Or was it not ?
I don't have a problem with this. The one guy that opens their window on an "overnight" flight that is actually during the day kind of messes up everything.
I have certainly been on some nifty flights where you could watch thunderstorms out the window the entire time (I made a neat timelapse)... but in the end, I guess it doesn't matter.
The nice thing about the 787 Dreamliner is that the windows don't have physical shades. They have remote controlled dimmers that the crew can operate centrally.
It would make me sad to remove windows on small commuter jets, since it's so much fun looking out the window and you spend a significant proportion of the flight closer to the ground anyways, watching interesting things like cities.
But on long-haul flights like Emirates has? Only 2/10 people per row have a window seat to start with, and airlines usually require everyone to close their window shade anyways for much/most of the trip, for people who want to sleep.
Sure you lose a bit of romance, but honestly for the majority of the passengers and for most of the time there's going to be zero difference... except burning less fuel means being better for the environment and hopefully slightly cheaper tickets.
That is the biggest 'wow' in the article, and I'd really love to see a source on that... but they don't provide a source and I cannot find this info when googling. Anyone can back up that claim?
I can't believe that's possible. I really want to know where that number came from.
Maybe you could reduce the weight of just the frame of the fuselage by 50%, but I bet you'd save at most 2-3% of the total takeoff weight, once you include fuel, wings, tail, engines, gear, cabin, baggage, people, cockpit, etc.
It claims a total possible weight reduction on an A320 from 2155kg to 1560kg, or 600kg off the fuselage (plus an additional 150kg elsewhere for a total savings of 750kg). An A320 weighs 42,000kg empty and 78,000kg at takeoff. 2155kg is probably the weight of the fuselage frame sections containing the windows - makes sense that you could save 50% off that piece.
That's a reduction of 1% or so off the takeoff weight.
Also, note that cargo planes are already windowless. I couldn't find a good example of a plane that has both freight and passenger versions that are otherwise identical.
Not to mention that their projection system will bring some weight and use energy, surly offsetting gains, so that whole sentence should be stricken from the article.
Well, it's not just the added weight of windows, but, I imagine, additional reinforcements for the structure that are needed when you have windows? (IANAPE - I'm not a plane expert :) )
You are correct. There's a forged doubler that goes around the window opening to reinforce it. The DeHaviland Comet lost several airplanes due to cracks starting from the windows; Boeing was having none of that.
That was more due to the shape of the windows then due to the fact that it had windows. Square holes are not a good idea in aluminum that's under tensile stress. For the same reason you end a straight cut into metal in a round hole, otherwise you'll surely end up with a stress fracture.
> It claims a total possible weight reduction on an A320 from 2155kg to 1560kg...An A320 weighs 42,000kg empty
Does this seem odd? The fuselage only accounts for 5% of the empty weight of the plane. I checked your sources and that's what I see too, but it still sounds low. Where does the rest of the weight go? The engines weigh about 4600 kg total. Seats weigh 35 kg x 200 or about 7000 kg. That leaves 28,000 kg. Wings? Landing gear?
Wings can easily take up 20-30% of total plane weight. Then there's a whole flight electronics and hydraulics, other interior (like ceiling, A/C), APU, tail, landing gears, etc.
So wings could be as much as 14,000 kg (7 times the weight of the fuselage) and all those other bits total 14,000 together? I'm on a plane now and it's still hard to believe that each wing (without the engine) could be 3 times the weight of the body of the plane. But I guess it must be true. Thanks for the colour.
Not necessarily. Another commenter on this subthread found that the weight savings equate to 1-3% of total take off weight (fuselage, engines, fuel, people, cargo). There is a safety benefit to having windows (inspecting in-flight damage to aircraft). Is 1% weight savings enough to remove a safety feature? I don’t know the answer, but it certainly isn’t a clear-cut win.
To be perfectly honest, this number sounds speculative at best (utter nonsense at worst).
The fuselage is generally about 20-40% of the entire dry, empty weight of an aircraft (speaking strictly about large transport aircraft). So clearly seeing that kind of reduction in weight isn't really possible strictly from structurally modifying the fuselage (and even major modifications of the entire airframe). If we look at comparing planes with windows (like those operated by passenger airlines) to those without (like those operated by cargo airlines), loose estimates are less than 1% to around 1% weight savings from removing windows alone. Even if you assume massively increased returns on weight savings because of massive changes in airframe design it's probably no where near 50%...
Keep in mind, even incredibly small weight reductions mean huge savings over the lifetime of an aircraft (especially if they are also carried out over an entire fleet).
It's probably done using Hollywood accounting: 50% lighter for the specific oval region where there used to be glass. Probably only a 7% gain for the total fuselage.
Also Windows play a role in emergencies: "that sides on fire, let's open the other escape door"
Windows actually are used for visual inspection in flight in a number of cases. You can actually see markings above certain rows where a pilot or a flight attendant could look out and inspect something.
I think the types of things they would be looking for are flap deployment, icing, damage to the wing, gear deployment (though there is usually a window in the floor for this), etc.
There's a great YouTube channel called Mentour Pilot that covers a lot of stuff like this, but I can't find his video that discusses visual inspections.
That is correct. The existence of some windows enable passengers/personnel to check for engine or wing damage (fire, birds, flap issues etc). The idea I am guessing is to use video.
The 50% lighter just doesn't work any way you spin it. I think this is another example of the journalist not really digging and verifying statements in a subject their knowledge is lacking/non-existent. (Similar to, "wine/chocolate/smoking/x cures cancer new study shows".)
You can't just remove all the fuselage reinforcements even if you remove the windows... Still, observe as mentioned in calculations [0], even the ~1% gain is significant as it accumulates over time.
Not only cities, watching natural formations like lakes, rivers, fields, forests, hills and mountains from above is a unique perspective (compared to seeing the same from land), and very cool too. I remember being glued to the window, for tens of minutes (at least), on a flight from Europe to the US, when passing over the Arctic (or near it, not sure, but northern seas anyway), seeing vast expanses of ice floes and blue-green water glittering in the sunshine from high above. Then passing over Goose Bay as we crossed over Canada into the US, that was great too. Miles of green meadows or grassland.
With LCD screens say on the floor you can have glass bridge flying over Alps experience for every passenger independent of seat. Add magnification and AR.
Up here in the PNW I've seen some spectacular views of Mt Rainer, Mt St Helens and Mt Hood on approach/departure. Being up in the air lends to a great sense of scale and if you catch them during golden hour very few views compare.
I happily took window seat on 13hr direct flights for the chance of seeing them back when I traveled more often.
Mt. Shasta and the Wallowa mountains are also great to fly over on more inland routes. SF to the East coast takes you over the high Sierra which is fun and you can get some great beta on the snow conditions in the high country.
Does the "camera" point downwards? Straight out? The available views from a window seat are pretty close to a 180 degree half sphere. That won't be possible with a screen unless there's some way to pan.
Also no rays of sunlight :-/.
If there is some way to pan, it could be better than looking out the side for most passengers, if it's super HD. It presumably won't be blocked by the wing, and could encourage carriers to put nice outward-facing views on the seatback screens for passengers in other seats.
IMO it's definitely going to be a minor downgrade to the experience, offset by lower ticket prices.
If the point of removing windows is to save weight, it doesn't make sense to add cameras, screens, cables, power distribution, etc... which all add weight.
This is just nonsense. A display is merely a projection. you don't have any sense of depth, you can't shift the point of view, you don't have the dynamic range or resolution of the human eye. The only way it could be better if by giving you a point of view you can't normally have like directly in front or below the plane.
Note that RCI did not remove any windows, but instead used tech to give a window to people in inside cabins where there are no windows. IMHO this should be the way to go for planes as well: Give everybody a window seat, with VR. And then also use that VR to show all those movies in a virtual cinema, show VR games etc.
And some people would even pay more for that "enhanced" experience. And nothing says their experience should be limited to actual views of the outside - they could have the sensation of traveling through space at hyper-relativistic speeds or whatever experience they want.
In return, I'd be very happy if my window seat faced the window and my back a narrow corridor. I'll fetch my meals from the galley myself, if that's what it takes.
On airliners, at the very least, they could add good cameras with removable IR filters to all new planes and pipe real-time video (from gate to gate) to the entertainment system. Flying and being able to watch the Milky Way from above the clouds would be a memorable experience. Has anyone in management even consider what makes people learn to fly themselves in the first place? Hint: it's not the paycheck.
I don't know about you, but I find that to be dystopian and weird. Nothing against windowless airplanes but damn, that thing is weird and scary. It's straight out of Black Mirror [1]. One of these days some PM will have the great idea to overlay some promo bullshit on top of it and in the future basically make you watch 'safety' messages or ads.
Note that you can turn it off at any time. And there are no ads there, it's just a pure 4K 60fps stream from the bridge with some artifical railings rendered on top. There are even 2 cameras, one for each side, and you get the view in the correct direction.
My position is also to not remove any windows, but give the 90% of passengers without a window seat a window seat.
> Note that you can turn it off at any time. And there are no ads there, it's just a pure 4K 60fps stream from the bridge with some artifical railings rendered on top. There are even 2 cameras, one for each side, and you get the view in the correct direction.
I'm not saying that your wrong or that's it's not interesting/cool, I'm just saying give it a few years and some profit forecast misses and then we'll talk.
I'd never, ever, under no circumstances, want to fly on a plane without windows. I hate the 787's stupid way of taking away my control of the window for the idiotic gimmick of controlling transparency through buttons. I like to see the sunrise. I like to see the sunset. I like to see the clouds below and the dark sky above.
If people want no windows or a completely dark place, let them add walls, curtains or put bags on their heads.
Kill the windows entirely if it can be safely done. I don't care. Cost, safety, speed. All else is optional.
And wtf are these guys who panic without windows going to do when they have to close them so others can sleep. I think that's a stupid objection. People are intelligent. They aren't going to panic for this shit. That's idiotic.
People already panic on flights. On my last NRT-LAX flight a woman totally freaked out and started running up and down the aisles screaming. Unfortunately, the Singapore Air crew was far too polite and spoke soothingly to her for far too many hours of a very long flight.
I've also seen someone freak out during turbulence on a CDG-IAH flight. The Air France flight crew was less patient and dragged her into the back of the plane where she was presumably restrained or sedated or something.
If you've never been on a flight where someone lost their shit, you don't fly very much. Or at least you take short flights.
I've never been in a windowless plane, but I think I would be anxious that I'd have a panic attack because of the claustrophobia - not that I'm claustrophobic, I can travel in lifts. When all the windows are closed I don't get anxious because I know if I get a panic attack (which has never happened!) I will always be able to ask someone to open a window, or even jump over a few people and open it myself.
But well, maybe you're a psychologist and your flippant dismissal of it all as being "idiotic" is correct.
Man, I wish I could just form some sort of group of normal people and we could have cheap, fast, efficient things that don't have to cater to the seventh sigma.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadAll in all this is a cool concept, but I don't think it will be executed well. What happens when my "window" inevitably breaks (as technology is apt to do) and the illusion of being able to see is broken? What about annoying dead pixels or color banding? I can't imagine the displays being used are very high quality.
Metro lines don't tend to have much visible outside them (if anything at all save for some flashing lights), and there are extended scenarios like the Channel Tunnel where passengers basically don't see anything for over 30 minutes.
Just make sure they can plug into Facebook/Instagram/YouTube/Social Media of choice and quite literally most people wouldn't care in the slightest.
That's not to say the negative reaction of a small minority wouldn't be vastly increased, but I think the masses would still be perfectly fine.
The main problem I see with this is that both the small minority and the large majority are locked together inside a tin can speeding through the stratosphere. I'd rather not find out how fast panic might propagate under such conditions.
You say that like there's anywhere else that it matters
yes this is sarcasm
I'm trying to explain to you that a window with some clouds does not alleviate my claustrophobia. So, whether the windows are virtual or not make no difference to me, even if one malfunctions...
Jesus
The economics literature begs to differ, though it's not a 1:1, as the improvements are usually specific to an area of the market while the labor market is much less specific, which actually means that the benefits are less because they're dispersed over a wider group of people, marginally improving the lives of people who didn't even have productivity improvements in the work they do.
Although that's probably regulatory stuff. Most governments don't let arbitrary airtcaft do aerial topography-grade stuff, and companies err on the side of caution.
No windows in exchange for a discounted ticket; I think people will happily eat it up! If you sit in the middle of a row of ten seats (plus two aisles) the windows were just blobs of light in the distance anyway.
Customers have no real visibility into any of this, eg you're lucky to know what kind of aircraft will be flying a route let alone what interior configuration it will have (and all of that can and is regularly changed between booking and departure).
I'd gladly pay an extra $10 or $20 to fly with more legroom or a plane with windows, which would be a realistic reflection of what these cost carriers (10-20% extra), but these are major revenue centers for them. On the last flight I took, Delta wanted an extra $110 for an exit-row seat, on a flight that cost $165. That's just blatantly milking it. At time of departure, 5 of 6 seats were unfilled and they had to fill them with main-cabin passengers.
The only real control you have is over what carrier you fly with, and there are definitely people who will refuse to fly with budget carriers. By the time they are done nickel-and-diming you for having a carryon and everything, you end up in the same place anyway.
But even there, people only have a small degree of choice in carriers either. Delta is the vast majority of flights out of my airport (Wikipedia says 75%), I'd love to go with Alaska Airlines or someone but I don't really have a choice.
So, there's lots of reasons this isn't really an efficient market.
Lots of people say they'd rather pay more for those extras, but the evidence indicates otherwise. Lower prices wins custom.
What if your glass window inevitably breaks? That actually happened recently and a passenger died.
I don't think this is any kind of issue.
It's not like the software world, where we slap on a feature, do some mild testing, and maybe do a little bit more debugging when the user complains about it.
JAL had it, too, on ORD-NRT. A member of the crew would switch to different cameras, presumably based on what there was to see (front landing gear view during takeoff, just clouds straight down during most of the flight, etc...). I haven't flown JAL in close to a decade, so I can't say if its planes still have this.
No windows at all = travel sickness, panic attacks, no spotting of fires, the issue with exits in emergency landings etc.
E.g. 80% fewer windows = none of the problems above. True the window seat is then mostly less desirable, but on a long haul, they see nothing for 99% of the journey anyway.
Endless clouds below, dark blue skies above, the occasional contrail of another plane on a slightly different route, the moon over the ocean, the stars, auroras, sunrises, sunsets, large ocean liners or cargo ships below, wind farms, mountains, cities, the Alps, the Grand Canyon, endless patterns of irrigation. The Earth is unfathomably beautiful from above.
Surely this is nonsense, even if you are considering empty weight, when you take the engines and main spar into consideration?
The reason why windows are shaped as they are is to withstand the constant pressure changes without suffering catastrophic fatigue stress failure.
Great! Less legroom but, in return, you get no windows.
I'd be very surprised if that's not the case. You'd need a plane that's designed from the ground up to not have windows in any configuration.
weight with windows - weight without windows = 2 * (weight with virtual windows - weight without windows)
NOT weight with windows = 2 * weight without windows
NOR fuselage weight with windows = 2 * fuselage weight without windows
The net savings is about 1%.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/fl...
I can see how with the central compartments it could be more difficult to meet that sort of time constraint. It'll be interesting to follow how the engineers seek to create a design for evacuating in time.
This would probably also allow for much larger windows.
> Not really, aviation expert Douglas Drury from the University of South Australia says.
Not a common need (thankfully) but windows also provide a way to look into plane as well, say in times of emergency or a hostage taking. That’s one of the reasons you’re required to open them when you take off and land.
I wonder if their answer to that is a live video feed of the inside of the plane to the tower.
I fly pretty regularly in the US and am unaware of this rule, where have you encountered it? I've only ever heard crew request windows be closed to mitigate the greenhouse effect and keep the plane a bit cooler.
I've heard this was more for the reason of passengers safety being able to see whats going on outside - i.e. engine smoke, pieces of wing coming off, etc to let the crew know and in an emergency landing being able to tell what is outside (fire, water, militant guerrillas)
They could implement head tracking to solve this, but that breaks down as soon as more than one person need to look through the same window.
That said with some fairly simple optics you could give the "look" of parallax. There are a number of "3D like" lens solutions that go over high resolution screens to create different views at different angles, if they really wanted to go that way.
I'd say just make it look like you're going down a subway... passing trains and all!
I can't remember which airline it was, though. I don't fly discount very often, so it's hard to pinpoint. It would have to have been American, United, or maybe JetBlue. I sleep as much as possible, even on short flights, so few are memorable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DduO1fNzV4w
[Or: no, looking directly through optical system A is not guaranteed to have "higher resolution" (really, MTF) than looking at a display of a digital image captured through optical system B]
But really, that is only accessible for passengers in window seats and on day time flights. With Emirates, that is a small %age of the time! 2 out of 10 passengers per row, and windows have to be down overnight.
For this airline, a passengers' opportunity to gaze out a window is simply less.
Every emirates flight I've taken has included tail, nose and belly camera shots to screen right in front of me. Blurry, not the highest possible resolution, but a FAR more interesting perspective!
Not every experience that a window gives you can be replicated. As the plane banks over the bay, spotting your house or favorite park is probably never going to happen with cameras, nor being able to watch the ground crew work.
But for the bulk of the flight, the takeoff, the landing, man the external camera feeds are great. As a passenger, I'd gladly ditch the windows for better cameras, on pretty much any flight.
Looking at the landscape through the screen would be like watching a live performance on your phone's screen (which is, surprise, a loooot of people do).
And people saying "What's the difference between a windowless plane and a plane where all the windows are shuttered, the people insisting on windows are stupid!" are... stupid. With a windowless plane I think my anxiety would cause claustrophobia. With a windowed plane I know I won't get that anxiety...
I have certainly been on some nifty flights where you could watch thunderstorms out the window the entire time (I made a neat timelapse)... but in the end, I guess it doesn't matter.
But on long-haul flights like Emirates has? Only 2/10 people per row have a window seat to start with, and airlines usually require everyone to close their window shade anyways for much/most of the trip, for people who want to sleep.
Sure you lose a bit of romance, but honestly for the majority of the passengers and for most of the time there's going to be zero difference... except burning less fuel means being better for the environment and hopefully slightly cheaper tickets.
Maybe you could reduce the weight of just the frame of the fuselage by 50%, but I bet you'd save at most 2-3% of the total takeoff weight, once you include fuel, wings, tail, engines, gear, cabin, baggage, people, cockpit, etc.
Edited: I looked into this more deeply and found the following: https://aerospace-europe.eu/media/books/CEAS2015_211.pdf
It claims a total possible weight reduction on an A320 from 2155kg to 1560kg, or 600kg off the fuselage (plus an additional 150kg elsewhere for a total savings of 750kg). An A320 weighs 42,000kg empty and 78,000kg at takeoff. 2155kg is probably the weight of the fuselage frame sections containing the windows - makes sense that you could save 50% off that piece.
That's a reduction of 1% or so off the takeoff weight.
Also, note that cargo planes are already windowless. I couldn't find a good example of a plane that has both freight and passenger versions that are otherwise identical.
It's always sad when physics gets in the way of aesthetics...
Does this seem odd? The fuselage only accounts for 5% of the empty weight of the plane. I checked your sources and that's what I see too, but it still sounds low. Where does the rest of the weight go? The engines weigh about 4600 kg total. Seats weigh 35 kg x 200 or about 7000 kg. That leaves 28,000 kg. Wings? Landing gear?
The operating empty weight (OEW) is the sum of the manufacturer's empty weight (MEW), standard items (SI), and operator items (OI).
Basically the whole plane, interior outfit and crew needed for full operations, excluding the actual fuel and payload.
An A320 carries around 25,000 L of fuel.[0] Jet fuel weighs ~0.81 kg/L (it varies by temperature).[1][2]
25,000 L * 0.81 kg/L = 20,250 kg = 44,550 lbs.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A320_family
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel
[2] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/48785/how-is-fu...
The fuselage is generally about 20-40% of the entire dry, empty weight of an aircraft (speaking strictly about large transport aircraft). So clearly seeing that kind of reduction in weight isn't really possible strictly from structurally modifying the fuselage (and even major modifications of the entire airframe). If we look at comparing planes with windows (like those operated by passenger airlines) to those without (like those operated by cargo airlines), loose estimates are less than 1% to around 1% weight savings from removing windows alone. Even if you assume massively increased returns on weight savings because of massive changes in airframe design it's probably no where near 50%...
Keep in mind, even incredibly small weight reductions mean huge savings over the lifetime of an aircraft (especially if they are also carried out over an entire fleet).
Also Windows play a role in emergencies: "that sides on fire, let's open the other escape door"
That seems extremely hypothetical and optimistic. If your large passenger plane is on fire you're probably already dead.
I think the types of things they would be looking for are flap deployment, icing, damage to the wing, gear deployment (though there is usually a window in the floor for this), etc.
There's a great YouTube channel called Mentour Pilot that covers a lot of stuff like this, but I can't find his video that discusses visual inspections.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwpHKudUkP5tNgmMdexB3ow/fea...
It's also one of the requirements for starts and landings, along with "make sure your seat back and folding trays are in their full upright position".
The 50% lighter just doesn't work any way you spin it. I think this is another example of the journalist not really digging and verifying statements in a subject their knowledge is lacking/non-existent. (Similar to, "wine/chocolate/smoking/x cures cancer new study shows".)
You can't just remove all the fuselage reinforcements even if you remove the windows... Still, observe as mentioned in calculations [0], even the ~1% gain is significant as it accumulates over time.
[0] https://aerospace-europe.eu/media/books/CEAS2015_211.pdf
Not only cities, watching natural formations like lakes, rivers, fields, forests, hills and mountains from above is a unique perspective (compared to seeing the same from land), and very cool too. I remember being glued to the window, for tens of minutes (at least), on a flight from Europe to the US, when passing over the Arctic (or near it, not sure, but northern seas anyway), seeing vast expanses of ice floes and blue-green water glittering in the sunshine from high above. Then passing over Goose Bay as we crossed over Canada into the US, that was great too. Miles of green meadows or grassland.
I happily took window seat on 13hr direct flights for the chance of seeing them back when I traveled more often.
Also no rays of sunlight :-/.
If there is some way to pan, it could be better than looking out the side for most passengers, if it's super HD. It presumably won't be blocked by the wing, and could encourage carriers to put nice outward-facing views on the seatback screens for passengers in other seats.
IMO it's definitely going to be a minor downgrade to the experience, offset by lower ticket prices.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4__AIB8Bl-4
Note that RCI did not remove any windows, but instead used tech to give a window to people in inside cabins where there are no windows. IMHO this should be the way to go for planes as well: Give everybody a window seat, with VR. And then also use that VR to show all those movies in a virtual cinema, show VR games etc.
In return, I'd be very happy if my window seat faced the window and my back a narrow corridor. I'll fetch my meals from the galley myself, if that's what it takes.
On airliners, at the very least, they could add good cameras with removable IR filters to all new planes and pipe real-time video (from gate to gate) to the entertainment system. Flying and being able to watch the Milky Way from above the clouds would be a memorable experience. Has anyone in management even consider what makes people learn to fly themselves in the first place? Hint: it's not the paycheck.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
My position is also to not remove any windows, but give the 90% of passengers without a window seat a window seat.
I'm not saying that your wrong or that's it's not interesting/cool, I'm just saying give it a few years and some profit forecast misses and then we'll talk.
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/airline...
So why is it safe to remove the windows entirely?
If people want no windows or a completely dark place, let them add walls, curtains or put bags on their heads.
And wtf are these guys who panic without windows going to do when they have to close them so others can sleep. I think that's a stupid objection. People are intelligent. They aren't going to panic for this shit. That's idiotic.
I've also seen someone freak out during turbulence on a CDG-IAH flight. The Air France flight crew was less patient and dragged her into the back of the plane where she was presumably restrained or sedated or something.
If you've never been on a flight where someone lost their shit, you don't fly very much. Or at least you take short flights.
That way I can just take the later/earlier flight and leave the crackpots to themselves.
But well, maybe you're a psychologist and your flippant dismissal of it all as being "idiotic" is correct.