In Ozone’s Numa Numa video, one shot includes a singer closing a window in the cockpit of a medium-sized aircraft (think commuter size).
Is/was there an aircraft with this actual feature? It looks real, but seems unlikely, and other shots include some obvious fakery.
You can see it in action here: O Zone Dragostea Din Tei English Version - YouTube
Lots of commercial aircraft–most, I suspect–have openable cockpit windows. The largest commercial craft, the A380, has them.
Yep. Here’s private pilot and airliner enthusiast John Travolta sticking his grinning mug out of one!
Most large planes have cockpit windows that can open like that.
A real airline captain discussing the windows on an A320.
Also, if both front windows are damaged in flight, and autoland isn’t available, there is a procedure for the pilot flying to open the window to get a view onto the runway. As Captain Joe says, “that puts a visual approach to a whole nother level”.
Lots more info in the video.
Thanks, all. So, when did we figure out how to manage a window in a pressurized cockpit? Was it one of the first discoveries after we started pressurizing cabins (along with rounded windows and inward-opening doors), or did it take a few years until somebody had a “eureka!” moment?
As long as they open inward I don’t think pressurisation is much of an issue.
On the BAe146 the flight deck “C” screen (third window from the central pillar) doubles as an emergency exit.
The Douglas DC-3, one of the first passenger planes, had a sliding cockpit window, and it was designed in the 1930s. But then it didn’t have a pressurized cockpit. However, it does show that passenger planes back then had windows that you could open.
The Lockheed Constellation, a propeller-driven passenger plane from the 1940s, was pressurized and had a sliding cockpit window.
The de Havilland Comet, the first modern style passenger jet, had small triangular windows in the cockpit that could be opened. This was the plane that came apart in the air after a while due to metal fatigue (something that wasn’t well understood at the time), and led to rounder windows being used on all aircraft.
So basically, windows that open have been a feature on airliners since the very beginning.
Even Concorde had cockpit windows that could open: http://www.concordesst.com/pictures/news/andre_wave.jpg
Oh, also: Curse you, ECG for getting me hooked on yet another youtube channel. If you’re going to give out links like that, at least pick the geeky ones that are barely accessible to non-specialists. Captain Joe is too easy to understand and follow - it’s like Crack for my curiousity nerve. 
My work here is done.
As **engineer_comp_geek **said, pretty much from the git-go. Having openable cockpit windows predates pressurization. So when they invented pressurization, figuring out how to do cargo doors, passenger doors, escape hatches, yes and cockpit windows, was all part of the process.
The reason the windows open at all is that they are emergency escape hatches. In the few airliner types where the windows don’t open there’s some sort of escape hatch inside the cockpit, usually on the roof. The current Bombardier CRJ series has a hatch instead of openable windows. Here’s a view from inside https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/490/18990450694_97b115df08_b.jpg and outside https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3303/5722440415_a3dec2db29_b.jpg
The L-1011 was another example with a hatch instead. I *think *the 747 is hatched as well, but that’s a very fuzzy memory and worth what you paid for it.
C-130s have two opening windows on the flight deck and, in fact, are considered points of egress in case of emergency. Obviously you’d have to be on the ground. We all had to squeeze our way through one of them during egress training so that we could see exactly how tight they really are and why you should move Heaven and Earth to find another way out.
For the record, they are damn tight, and it’s a long drop to the ramp if you do it wrong.
The 747 was also famously one of the last aircraft to have a sextant port. I’m pretty sure it’s not aft of the crew hatch, which leads to my question --was the sextant port actually part of the crew hatch?
I don’t know (yet) about the sextant port but I was able to confirm that 747s have non-openable cockpit windows and a cockpit roof escape hatch a bit behind the captain’s position on the left side.
According to the chattering of these retired old pilots, the 747-100 did have a sextant port, and it was regularly used in the early days, but in later models it was just transformed into a smoke evacuation port. From other sources, the 707, DC-8, and other aircraft of that era had them, too. Take that all for what it’s worth, just stuff I scoured off airliner fan sites. However this does appear to be an indisputable picture of that style of sextant in use, albeit it’s a BOAC VC-10.
I knew that the DC-3 had one and I’m surprised that something so archaic survived into the relatively modern era. However it was even more primitive on the DC-3. It was basically a hemispherical dome instead of a hole accommodating periscope-like instrument. You stuck your head up into it and (I presume) used a classical nautical-type sextant, of the “… and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by” variety!
In looking around at pictures of DC-3s, it appears that relatively few of them had the hemispherical thing I was describing (called an “astrodome”). Here’s a C-47 (a military DC-3) that has one, and a TWA DC-3 with one. And this is how they were used. Not sure what the alternative was if they didn’t have one – perhaps they didn’t fly over oceans, or had one of the periscope type sextants.
So back in the day a navigator *really * had to know how to navigate. I had no idea, but it does make sense. How often did flights end up in wrong places?
I wonder how feasible (or possible) it would be to navigate an aircraft using a marine sextant? Aircraft sextants, which were used through the early 1970s by airlines and through at least the 1990s by military, have invaluable features like an artificial horizon and an averaging mechanism. The navigator pre-computed the sight using the Air Almanac so the position could be plotted in real time after making the observation. These were precision instruments that could measure within a minute or two if used correctly, so there would be little chance of getting lost in the middle of the ocean.
The FAA still publishes a how-to book for being a flight navigator. It’s not a complete training course in itself, but for those interested, it’s a decent intro to the conceptual logic and actual practice of celestial nav as applied to airplanes. You can skim all the relevant sections in just a couple hours.
See Aviation Handbooks & Manuals | Federal Aviation Administration for a roster of the various FAA books and https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/aviation/media/FAA-H-8083-18.pdf for the actual 72MB pdf.
When taking sightings you of course have the problem a modern jet is moving at roughly 8 miles per minute. So if it takes you two minutes to take each of three stars those readings are almost 50 miles apart. So you’ve got some extra math to correct all three sightings to what they would have been had they been taken simultaneously. That was easier in the old days when overwater prop planes were going only 3 or 4 miles a minute. Of course it’s even easier on a 5 knot sailboat.
The other main challenge with using a marine sextant on an airplane is finding the star in the first place. Standing on the deck of a ship you can see most of the entire dome of the sky. And you can use your sky knowledge to find, say, Orion, then some particular nearby star to take a sighting of it.
If you could have a similar dome (ref astrodome on DC-3 above) on an airplane it’d be possible to find your target star similarly. Then your main problem would be A) vibration, and B) accurately locating the horizon in the dark.
With the typical airplane not having a human head-sized astrodome, you’ll be using an aircraft sextant which means you’re looking for stars through a soda straw. You need to be able to pre-compute about where it’ll be seen, set that into the sextant, then look through it, find the start nearby, then tweak the crosshairs to get the real reading.
The C-9A / DC-9 had a rope that the aircrew threw out the window then climbed down. I wouldn’t want to try that on a C-5!
We also use those windows to reach out clean the outside of the windshields.
