Airbus is taking air travel to the future with windowless cockpits

If it was good enough for Captain Picard, it ought to be good enough for Captain Sullenberger. Airbus, one of the largest manufacturers of large passenger jets, has patented a new cockpit design that could both increase a pilot’s situational awareness and highlight the diminishing necessity of physical pilots. The concept uses external cameras that can cover a much wider portion of the sky than any paltry window, can pan and zoom as needed, and even provide dynamic 3D viewing and range-finding. And, of course, it makes airplanes much easier to design. Putting pilots at the front of the plane is necessary when they need to physically look out of the plane. However, this introduces some terrible incentives as far as aerodynamics are concerned, and requires the introduction of less hardy materials than make up the rest of the fuselage. It is also, as we are increasingly learning through the use of big data, not nearly as effective as we normally assume; pilot error accounts for a large portion of the crashes that do occur, and windows offer a fairly limited field of view. If engineers were free to design the perfect nose section without such considerations, however, better shaping and security could result.

Aerospace manufacturer Airbus was recently awarded a patent that would create windowless airplane cockpits where outside views are transmitted via display. While windowed cockpits have been a fixture of flight since its earliest days, Airbus sees an opportunity to completely rework the aerodynamics of commercial flight by removing the cockpit from its traditional, forward facing posture to one that can be placed nearly anywhere on an aircraft. Using both aerodynamics and economics as the justification for its new scheme, Airbus believes that removing pilots from the nose of the plane could allow engineers to reshape the leading edge, and in turn the entire fuselage of its fleet. With a more streamlined geometry both fuel consumption and overhead costs could be reduced. At the same time, airspeeds might increase. Everyone wins! Though Airbus has been awarded a patent for this this new cockpit/configuration strategy the company hasn’t made any announcements about when a scheme like this might be placed into production. Before that time I suspect Airbus will have to design ways to maintain a fluid, uninterrupted video feed that could weather both the elements and any debris that might blind a pilot. It’s possible that in future planes onboard video might be replaced by a combination of satellite and ground based imagery that could be stitched together to form a realistic cockpit view. However, that reality and the processing power that would be required to bring such a feed live seems prohibitively expensive, if not impossible to produce. For the time being Airbus’ new cockpit concept will have to remain an idea – albeit an idea that pushes aviation further into the 21st century. When autonomously controlled passenger jets could hit the skies is still anyone’s guess.