Yes and no. You will notice that on virtually every airliner out there, the windows are damn near identical. Maybe one of our Boeing engineers can confirm, but I’d be willing to lay long odds that they use essentially the same design from airliner to airliner in an attempt to limit the amount of effort needed to provide structurally sound windows. Double the size of the windows and the passengers would be really, really happy, but the engineers would be very, very unhappy.
So they are irrelevant as a design issue only because they use the same solution over and over again.
Something I’ve always wondered: whenever I have flown at a high altitude over the ocean, it takes on this “frozen in time” aspect where all the waves seem completely motionless. Is this an optical illusion based on the distance involved, is it because all the waves are moving in the same direction and thus in relation to each other are indeed motionless?
Right. Because one thing we air travelers want is to be treated like pieces of cargo even more than we are now.
As someone pointed out, why does anything have windows for anyone other than the driver/pilot’s benefit? People like being able to see what’s going on outside. Especially if you are flying through the air or on the water.
Passenger aircraft, trains, boats are all designed for people and to make the trip as enjoyable as possible. People like being able to look out the window at the Manhattan skyline as they fly into Laguardia or the Vegas strip as they circle McCarran. You don’t get the same effect from a bunch of LCD screens as you do from a plane full of windows when the sun rises during a transcontinental flight.
If you are delivering a pallet of auto parts or a SEAL team to some hot LZ, by all means use a purely functional windowless aircraft.
I think there are a lot of other reasons as well. Rapidly evacuating 700 passengers in an emergency. Integrating such an radically different aircraft into existing airport infrastructure. Just designing the airframe.
I wondered about this when I saw Fifth Element and they basically put everyone into these beds and knocked them out for the duration of the flight. Granted, this was an interspace flight, but it was a neat idea. Still, considering that not everyone responds the same to anesthesia, even if you could find anesthesia that was 100% safe (suspended animation?) it probably wouldn’t work that well. And then you’d get lawsuits. “I was awake during the whooooooole flight!”
Do you think that is due to good luck? Or due to the fact that the designers “worried about the structural disadvantages of windows” after the issues with the Comet?
An airplane fuse is a pressure vessel. Anything that penetrates that pressure vessel is a huge deal. At altitude, the airplane’s cabin is pressurized to 10-12PSI above the outside atmosphere. Sure, that doesn’t sound like much, but that’s not pounds, it’s pounds per square inch. The windows on the planes I work on are 19"X26" ellipses. That’s almost 400 in^2. Which means that window is holding back 4,000-4,800 lbs. Trust me when I tell you that the structural disadvantages are closely calculated.
I was in no way implying that passenger jets should not have windows. I have no idea why anyone thought I was. All I did was point out cargo planes have no windows.
Occasionally there is: on my last trip to Australia I took this picture of New Caledonia just before sunrise (at least, I think it was New Caledonia: there isn’t any other land that big where the plane would have been at that time).
I thought the pressure difference was less than that, and Wikipedia gives a value of 7.5-8 psi. Sure, that sounds like even less, but still worth getting right (and I’d like a little safety margin, too).
Much of how an airplane looks, and what features it has, is the result of airline competitive demand. An airline that can offer attractive windows on their fleet will be more appealing to customers and travelers than one without.
One of the marketing appeals of the new 787 is the new larger windows (than any previous Boeing or Airbus models). The carbon composite fuselage has improved stress limits that make larger windows practical.
Given that we’ve had no window-blowout caused crashes on a properly maintained domestic airliner for at least 30-40 years, it seems clear that the engineers of today’s passenger aircraft have mastered the art of the window.
Sure. Robot Arm also mentioned the problems when sitting off the centerline, as well. But I remember specifically reading a study of passenger reactions to being inside a windowless plane that had to do with the blended wing feasibility, and it gave people the willies.
It’s possible to build a blended wing where the passengers still sit in the middle and there aren’t too many of them. For example, a combination passenger/cargo plane where the cargo is outboard and the passengers in the center. But people just don’t like it.
Why not the cargo or some other public spaces in the center?
I suppose you could put a few skylight windows in as well so people don’t feel like they are in some sort of windowless movie theater with no movie that rocks back and forth at 500 mph.
Hate to break it to you, but you’re pretty much screwed if your plane loses electrical power no matter how many windows the pilots have. If you lose power when you’re lined up, runway in sight, and have clearance, I understand that’s still bad. If you lose power when you’re not in that situation, it’s really bad, because you can’t see how fast you’re going, or where you are, or how high you are, and most importantly, you can’t talk to ATC or a nearby airport to tell them you’re screwed.
I wouldn’t use the words “mostly trivial.” I’d use “successfully solved,” since even the later versions of the Comet, with redesigned windows, didn’t suffer the problem. But that’s not to say it is something “not to be worried about.” And as well as Boeing and Airbus, history shows that Cessna, Gulfstream, Beechcraft, Sirus, Bombardier, and others have solved it. But that doesn’t mean their engineers don’t put a lot of work into the problem.
GargoyleWB notes that Boeing took the opportunity of using a different fuselage construction technique (carbon fiber rather than aluminum) to see whether they could enlarge the windows in the 787. That shows how important they view windows–larger windows are a selling point. I can only imagine the engineering hours it took for them to make the decision on window size and construction.
I suspect there might be more than a thousand things we know are proven mistakes in aircraft design, from, say, 80 year’s experience. Those are the “known knowns.” There might be as many “known unknown” things engineers explore in any new particular design or modification. I suspect what worries engineers, once they take care of the “known unknowns,” are the “unknown unknowns.” That is things they don’t know about and don’t imagine from history or after analysis that could go wrong. That’s what happened to the Comet engineers, or for that matter, the engineers of any plane that failed structurally in normal fight conditions.
