The Great Ongoing Aviation Thread (general and other)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1561

It’s a small target to hit, NP, and it’s both bad for the receiving team if it’s hit and the kicking team if it’s screwed up. Returners are taught to let the ball go over their heads if they’re inside the 5 or 10, as the ball will likely go into the end zone, which results in a touchback—a better result than any returner not named Devin Hester returning a punt inside the 5. But on a coffin corner kick, the ball may go out of bounds before crossing the end zone line, and the receiving team must then start their new line of scrimmage wherever that crossing point is. If inside the 5, it means many of the players are in or near the end zone, and the spectre of a possible Safety is in their heads.

If the kick results in a touchback, however, that gives the receiving team plenty of room to work. No real threat of a safety. Further, since coffin corner kicks aren’t often attempted from very far away from the other team’s end zone—because it’s a small target—getting a touchback means the ball wasn’t advanced very far, and the other team might have otherwise been better suited to try and convert on 4th Down instead.

Mainly, sportscasters are dramatic, and thematically lazy.

1562

Consider the AoAs each of these airplanes must fly at landing. For big deltas—and @LSLGuy covered this in a recent post here, it’s considerable. I.e., you could give the Concorde huge windows, and it still would have a tough time seeing the runway with 15-20 degree nose up, or whatever it was.

Also consider that windows—and any break in a solid hull panel—are weak points for pressurization and thermal intrusion. Minimizing those, if the mission or use case doesn’t require the user to have great visibility, sounds like a decent idea if possible. If there ever was an Aurora hypersonic airplane, I’d expect it to have full synthetic vision, and maybe chase planes for takeoff landing. The X-37 seems to do fine without windows.

Beautiful pictures though, Whack. Thanks for including them,

1563

Well, the X-37 doesn’t have a crew, so…

1564

Well first, none of your photo’s are taken from where a pilot’s eyes would be and so they’re not representative of what the actual view is.

While having a good view of the outside is sometimes important, it is also important to have a good view of the flight instruments. Unlike a car, it is not necessary to look out the front window in order to follow a road so other factors such as aerodynamics, structural integrity, position of engines etc can push windows out of the picture.

This is the view from my most recent steed (click the photo to see the full un-cropped pic):

Google Photos

Now, of course, I have lifted the camera up and forwards a bit, but I can do that with my seat as well when I want to have a better look out the window.

Here’s one on approach to the middle of nowhere, Australia (different aircraft type).

Google Photos

I’d assume the view out of the Concorde with the nose dropped would be similar.

I’ll let @LSLGuy tackle the nuts and bolts of eye height and low visibility instrument approaches.

1565

I think this was meant for somewhere else (posting this so you get notified).

1566

True but I watch a YouTube channel where a guy flies a TBM 850 and it is clear his sightline is really close to the top edge of the cockpit panel. Not sure how tall he is but at a guess 5’8" or so.

And you and you can see in the Spirit of St. Louis and the SR-71 their forward views are crud to almost non-existent.

The other planes…I doubt any except the Cirrus SR22 have a truly good forward view.

1567

So, windows aren’t needed for navigation, nor traffic avoidance. Provided we’re talking about a multiple billion dollar space plane, or even a mere quarter-billion subsonic high endurance platform like Global Hawk. Have enough cameras + money, and who needs windows?

I still think they’ll leave them on the vast majority of commercial and GA airplanes for now though.

1568

Certainly there are planes with great forward views (I put the Cirrus SR22 as an example but there are plenty more).

Which circles back to my question…some planes have great forward views, some have pretty limited views and, in the case of the (admittedly very old) Spirit of St. Louis basically no forward view…or at least about as limited as you can get.

1569

That’s about right. If you’re positioned correctly in an airliner you can generally just see down the top edge of the panel. You want to maintain this position for landing so you get consistent results and have a good view of both the instruments and the outside. Once airborne you can lift your seat up if you want a better view (many airline pilots will actually recline the seat and study the overhead panel for a while, normally after breaky.)

1570

The top picture was an Airbus A320, the bottom a BAe146, they both have very standard airliner views out the front. The B737 would be identical.

For aircraft like the Concorde, SR71, and Spirit of St Louis there will be very specific engineering reasons for their window layout.

Even something like an F-15 has a lot of instrument panel in front of the pilot.

1571

(What pictures are you referring to?)

1572

The ones I linked to.

1573

Not seeing the links. Probably me.

1574

Spirit of St Lewis was a special case.

Brian

1575

Google Photos

Google Photos

1576

Ah! I did not know you were referring to your previous post.

My bad.

Thanks.

1577

I wasn’t clear.

1578

Am I the only one who thinks that is not a good firewall?

1579

Richard has done an excellent job on the visibility thing. Here’s the few missing tidbits.

In airliners, the seat adjusts fore and aft about 15". It adjusts up and down about 10". And has a wide range of tilt, plus a couple of other minor tweaks. Plus the rudder pedals adjust fore and aft about 12".

There is a designated spot in 3D space where your eyes belong. Different airplanes have different ways of helping you identify that sweet spot. So you fiddle with the seat until your eyes are there. Then adjust the pedals until your feet reach them and you can get full travel, plus full toe-braking, plus a little. From the proper spot, the view out the front and sides is adequate.

Once positioned, people with big bodies and/or long arms find themselves a little close to the yoke, while small people will be reaching more. But it works for a very large range of people sizes.


As mentioned, even in modern fighters there’s a bunch of panel in front of the pilot. There is a strong compromise between ability to see enough of the panel and enough of the sky.


Most of the GA vids you see on YouTube are shot with a wide angle lens and/or the go-pro even closer to the windows than the pilot eyes. So the apparent huge unobstructed view of the sky is less true than it appears.


And yes, in jets the structural issues matter. The 737 nose is really a 707 nose dating from 1950. Not “the 50s”; 1950 was the year the pencil hit the paper on that design. Things have improved a bunch since then.

Measured in terms of angular extent from the design pilot eye position, the 757/767 have much larger widows. You’re sitting a little farther away from them to boot, so in terms of physical measurement they’re vastly larger. The L1011 was famous for truly ginormous cockpit windows. Folks transitioning from the 707 joked about being afraid of heights now that they could see so much more of the Earth.


For an airliner, the faster you’re going the more it’s true that 100% of what you care about is pretty much directly in front of you. And except during maneuvering combat, the same can be similar in a fighter.

I mentioned somewhere upthread that lightplanes are flown 90+% looking out the window with occasional glances inside at the gauges. Whereas transports are flown 90% inside with occasional glances out the windows.

On a standard ILS approach with clouds down to minimums you’ll first see the ground 15 seconds before impact. For a so-called Cat II approach it’s more like 7 seconds. That’s the only part of a pilot-landed approach that needs to even look out the window. If similar conditions existed at takeoff, one might spend an entire flight except for a total of 20 seconds totally in the clouds never even looking at the windows, much less seeing something through them.

OTOH …
If you click on my avatar to pull up my user profile page and click the expand button at upper right you’ll see a pic I took out the 737 side window from my seat in proper eye position. We’re looking just a little aft of 9 o’clock. That was with my phone at 1:1 zoom, which approximates the human eye’s focal length.

There’s a lot more view out that window higher or lower even before you start moving your head around to maximize what you can see.

1580

Why no airliner designs with a bubble canopy like the B-47? Seems to me it would have the best visibility possible.