I don’t know if you already have an ID on the pic titled “What plane is this?” but I’m going to go with one of the several variants of the B-57A.
It was not answered & I do believe you’re right. Any idea what that circle in the windshield was for?
BTW, if you’re a fan of Fallout on Amazon Prime you may be able to see it as it was filmed where I took that photo. They also have a whole ‘wall’ of partial old F-4 carcasses
It appears to be an openable port in an otherwise fixed canopy. Now why you’d need to open it, I dunno. Maybe to hand your credit card to the fueling crew?
There’s one on each side and they have wires going to them so I would guess heated windows.
Most pix you can find are of the far more numerous B-57B variants which had a completely different cockpit & canopy arrangement. Here’s a cite & pic for an intact A model that might even be a day or weekend trip to visit in person for some of us. Silver RB-57A | Glen L Martin Museum.
Here’s a fairly high res pic of one in flight, where we can clearly see the pilot and the relationship between him and the circular port. File:Martin B-57A USAF 52-1418.jpg - Wikipedia.
I’m pretty well mystified. Before seeing detailed pix I thought it was probably an optically flat windshield insert that was common on fighter & tactical bombers of the era. But it’s too far off to the side and too low for that. It’s also real small, but that might be explained away by the plane’s straight and level B-17 style weapons delivery. But nope, that’s almost certainly not what it is.
It sure looks like the equivalent of a “wing window” on a 1950s car; a way to get a little extra ventilation into the cockpit on the ground. That sounds nuts but it’s the least silly idea I can come up with.
I was going to say it looks like a Canberra, then I did a search on B-57A 
Damned Yanks renaming everything they touch. 
But that was an excellent hint for more searching.
I found this cockpit interior pic of a genuine RAF Canberra and it has a decent close-up of the port: File:EE Canberra instument panel, Midland Air Museum. (12780760883).jpg - Wikimedia Commons.
.jpg){kind=link}
It’s either a vent of some sort or a way to pass small things (orders?) into or out of the cockpit. In general ingress / egress of that model of airplane was not easy. The canopy is fixed and access is via a hatch on the starboard fuselage side.
If it’s heated (and that last photo looks to have wiring to support that idea) then it might be to provide a minimum level of visibility for landing.
These planes predate the federal aviation regulations, and are military and not civil, but the general concepts are common at least today; the windshield must allow the pilot to see where they are going and where they might land.
Ventilation seems like it could have been handled by significantly simpler mechanical means without dealing with the [glass/acrylic/whatever] of the windshield.
I considered something like photography port, but that doesn’t seem like a useful viewing angle.
Another thought that isn’t supported by @LSLGuy 's knowledge; a possible means to access an exterior release for the canopy for emergency egress.
A close up view showing wiring and explanation.
It’s a DV window (Direct Vision) used when the main canopy fogs or freezes up.
Good find, thanks!
Note than for the San Diego crash that:
The runway lights were out, a weather alert system wasn’t working and there was heavy fog at a San Diego airport when a pilot who had flown across the country made the decision to proceed with landing but came up short and crashed into a neighborhood, likely killing all six aboard the aircraft, investigators said Friday.
That information would have been on the ATIS and I suspect the Tower made mention of it.
Super find there @Magiver. Thank you!!!
I gotta say that trying to fly wearing a helmet and bento over forwards with your face wear enough that porthole down in that corner of the windshield would be a bitch. Even worse if you had to open it & withstand the breeze too.
Of course when the alternative is dying in a plane crash, you’d make do.
Lotta good info available here as always: AirNav: KMYF - Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport
The tower is closed at that time of day. They do have an ATIS that should become an ASOS broadcast at that hour. We can listen by phone at 858-576-4337. I just called it and it’s working fine now at 0300 Pacific.
The AP article doesn’t use technical terminology so we don’t know exactly what weather devices were or weren’t working. But the fact the pilot and regional ATC (not the airport control tower) were discussing using Miramar weather as a proxy for Montgomery suggests there wasn’t any weather info available at MYF. At least in airline ops, (and subject to a few exceptions as always) if a current report isn’t available, you’re not landing there.
“Runway lights” is likewise not real specific. In airline ops, there’s all sorts of details on what lighting needs to be operating and how minimums need to be amended upwards in the absence of some or all of the installed lighting. And if enough lighting is inop, the approach becomes completely unusable.
@Llama_Llogophile would be far more qualified than I to speak to this detail as it applies to bizjets. Of course if the pilot was unaware of the lighting problem that could not factor into their decision making. Of course a pilot is not supposed to be unaware of any known problems the FAA has published as a NOTAM. I’d be surprised if the ATC controller they were talking to would know or mention that.
It’s typical that when towers close for the night, the runway lights are switched off. But left in a mode where a pilot can switch them for a few minutes on a timer via a radio trigger. “Pilot-controlled lighting” (“PCL”) is the buzzword for anyone wanting more details. I am not familiar with all the symbology and such used on the NOAA format charts available from AirNav, but I suspect they’d have PCL and the pilot would need to trigger them. If they were working.
Almost needless to say, but even a perfectly flown approach in adequate but marginal weather than ends with approaching an unexpectedly blacked-out runway is very likely to end in failure.
All in all, this is shaping up to be the classic exhausted pilot approaching a very low probability of success arrival with the deck even more stacked against them than they knew. And the call of the preplanned parking place and bed exceeds the call to do something safer but far less convenient. Which works OK. Until it doesn’t.
Back on the B-57 / Canberra topic, this vid shows the startup process. And gives a good look at the big hatch on the right side through which the crew enters & egresses. And that very weird direct view port.
These engines use the old cartridge starting system where a much overgrown shotgun shell is fired and the resulting burst of gas spins the engine up to starting RPM almost instantly. The audio is more interesting than the video.
“The Automated Surface Observing Station (ASOS) at Montgomery Field near San Diego, CA stopped consistently transmitting weather observations on the evening of May 20,” said Erica Grow Cei, Public Affairs Specialist and Meteorologist at the NWS, in an email to KPBS. “Montgomery Field has been using nearby Miramar naval air station (KNKX) for observations.”
Well, that answers it from a reliable source. The local airport weather was unavailable at the time.
The general nature of SoCal and specifically San Diego weather is often very local; certain canyons always cloud up at the slightest provocation and others stay clear until nearly the whole region is socked in. The word “microclimate” might have been coined for there.
I don’t know how much, if any, local area knowledge the pilot had about greater SD and the microclimates of the several airports available. That will be an interesting tidbit if it emerges in the investigation.
Good catch. I thought hey was talking to the Tower and not a Center. What an extraordinarily bad decision to make. Turning the runway lights on and running them up to full brightness takes visual confirmation which you can’t make if you’re above the ceiling. Even if the Tower was open and turned the lights up high it’s still a 110 knot approach with a 200 ft ceiling.