No, really. Branson’s Virgin airline just launched it.
I’d take a ride in it.
I mean, not only is every window seat a window seat, but every aisle seat is also a window seat. How cool is that?
Sorry, April’s over.
HELL. NO .
If someone had made a video of me when I was at the top of the new Tokyo Tower, showing how long it took me to challenge my fear and inch over and quickly look down through that glass floor, it would win the Grand Prize on America’s Funniest Home Videos.
I was all ready to list the reasons it was BS, and the first reply pointed out it was a joke. Nice idea, but there are reasons (now unnecessary to enumerate) why it can’t be done as depicted.
‘HELL NO’? Hell YES!. It might not work for an airliner, but I can tell you the view from a Schweizer 300 with the doors off is spectacular. 
http://www.airliners.net/photo/Partenavia-P-68-Observer/1574897/M/
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Optica_Aircraft_-Flickr-mick-_Lumix.jpg
I have flow an Short Skyvan with a clear nose and a small one side only instrument panel. Can’t find a picture right now.
Bell 13 helicopter
Breezy
Lot of small planes that you can look vertically out of.
Yeah, no, fuck off.
I’d be interested in hearing the reasons it can’t be done as shown.
You’d need to relocate luggage or fuel, so OK, you’d need a modified plane design. And the pressure of high altitude on all that glass might be bad, so maybe you’d have to fly lower. (But wouldn’t the view be better lower down anyway? The photo on the fake web page makes it look like the plane isn’t all that high.)
But those seem like reasons a company couldn’t make money doing this, not reasons that it’s simply not possible at all.
“Modified plane design” is just another way of saying “Blowing billions and billions of dollars.” You’re literally redesigning the fundamental way every airliner is manufactured.
The luggage and center fuel tanks and airplane guts are all down below the passengers because that is the only place that they CAN go that makes any sense, if you want an airliner that will fly and make money doing it.
If the depicted glass-bottomed plane were built (quite a big if), passengers would have to wear soft slippers, and to see much of anything would have to lie face-down on the floor.
The practical way to accomplish this would be by means of a forward/down-facing high-res video camera (GoPro?) - which I, for one, would prefer to nearly every in-flight movie I’ve ever been offered.
Cutaway diagramme of a Boeing 737
I picked the 737 image because it’s large, and typical of airplane construction. As you can see, airplanes are not built like boats. With a typical pleasure boat, you have a layer of fiberglass or wood between you and the water. It’s a simple matter of cutting a window and putting in some plexiglass. Airliners have a bit more structure. There are ribs and longerons, wiring, ‘plumbing’, cargo, and all sorts of other things. In the linked image, look at the intersection of the wing and the fuselage. That’s a particularly strong bit of structure. It’s also where the main landing gear go. So to begin with, there’s a lot of stuff that you can’t simply cut out.
Next look at where the passengers are. The passenger deck is halfway up the cylinder. (Which makes sense, because the way you get the most people in is to put them in the widest part.) Assuming one could modify an airliner with a strip window on the bottom, the passengers would be looking through a two-foot slot from a perch ten feet above it.
This. Or build the damned things with windows high enough so that you can look at them. The way they are now, it’s difficult to look at anything but the ground. And the over-wing passengers don’t even get that! If you’re more than about four feet tall, those windows are useless.
This.
Wow! What a great idea! No technical reason it couldn’t have been done long ago. I wonder why no other airlines do this?
Well, I guess maybe we’ll see!
But with tiny camera technology today, there’s no reason you can’t mount external cameras on the belly and feed the view to seatback displays.
And now, as I look for a video of a tail-mounted camera I’ve seen, I find this article from 2011!
The Air France B777s I’ve been riding in for the past year between IAH and CDG have exactly this setup. Forward-facing for takeoff/landing, down-facing for cruise. Well, maybe not true hi-res, but it works.
Dude, it was an April Fool’s joke. There are all sorts of technical reasons it hasn’t been done.
I’ve flown the A380 and it has a camera mounted on the fin, looking over the fuselage, very cool view though I wish it would had a wider angle lens so it wouldn’t crop the wings out.
On another plane (probably 777 as El_Kabong mentioned) it had a belly mounted camera pointing straight down, not quite as cool, specially because the lens was dirty and fogged all the time. I suppose the fin camera lens is kept clean by the airstream, while the belly one gets smeared by whatever dirt covers the fuselage.
Besides the nice view from the fin camera I thought it would make a valuable safety addition (assuming the pilots can get the view in the cockpit), there have been a few airliner crashes due to the pilots not being aware of the damage to the airplane due to the restricted view from the cockpit; a 737 crashing short of a runway in the UK when one engine caught fire and the pilots shut down the good engine by mistake for example
That’s the Skytree. The old Tokyo Tower has one of those glass floors too. It does give one a funny little feeling even if you’re not normally afraid of heights.
How about inching over, then having the whole window unit tip over 30 degrees?
Does it have a Glass Bottom Toilet?
Because There’s the other half of the plane is beneath the passengers which can’t be removed or replaced. they could put cameras on the bottom of the plane and flat screens on the floor but the view is still pretty much the same as looking out the window.