Big screens are an OK workaround for no passenger windows, but they still have to contend with severe structural pressurization challenges, strict emergency evacuation rules, and incompatibility with current airport gates.
This sounds fixable in avionics and training. (Shallow, gradual banks.)
Note, too, that a larger lifting body needs to bank less to execute the same turn as a craft with more loading.
This is not really helpful for passenger comfort. For a turn to be comfortable, you want the turn to be such that the effective force the passengers feel has no sideways (relative to the passengers) component, and the required roll angle is only a function of the velocity and turning radius. The aircraft design is irrelevant.
The Wikipedia article is mediocre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_flight
My response is (a) this can be controlled in avionics and training, i.e. don’t do that, and (b) now that I think about it, vertical Gs aren’t as sickening as lateral ones.
Specify a maximum roll rate in training and normal-law software and this problem is solved
I’m wondering whether there are major airfields with traffic patterns that require roll rates that would exceed whatever maximum is desired for comfort. My intuition is that the situation would be tolerable at most airfields but that normal-law limits that are too restrictive could be dangerous.
One, this is where the more lifting body turning faster with less roll kicks in. Two, I suspect those airfields would also be the last ones to add terminals that can dock with a non-standard plane.
Can you explain what you mean? If an aircraft follows a given trajectory (center of mass position as a function of time x(t) where x is a 3D position), then it has an acceleration a(t) that is just the second derivative of x(t) and has nothing to do with the shape of the airframe.
Now account for gravity and kinematics: the force per unit mass that must be applied to the airframe is F/m = a + g • ẑ (ẑ is the upward unit vector).
The exact same result applies to a person inside the aircraft. If you want comfortable flight you need F/m to have no sideways component from the perspective of the passenger (and in the absence of gimballed seats the passenger is facing the same way as the airframe).
So far none of this has anything to do with the shape of the lifting body. And I’m wondering why you think more lifting body makes much difference. There are only two real flight parameters knobs you can turn to achieve this condition. You can roll, and you can sideslip. And, unless my intuition about the geometry is quite wrong, you would need a very extreme sideslip angle (pointing the nose quite close to the center of curvature) to have much effect on the required roll angle. So the roll angle needed is mostly a function of the angle of the acceleration vector plus gravity relative to the velocity and not much of a function of how the airframe is able to generate lift.
For another way to think of it, imagine a fancy rocket performing the exact same maneuver with no lift or drag whatsoever. Either the rocket could point itself toward the center of curvature (adjusted for gravity as above) and use its main engines to generate the required acceleration (extreme sideslip), or it could point roughly the same direction as its velocity vector and use a sideways-firing rocket to generate the required acceleration. If the latter, then, for passenger comfort, the roll angle needs to be such that the sideways rocket is in the front/back/up/down plane with respect to the passengers, which determines the required roll angle.
And I don’t see how any of this has anything to do with the same of a lifting body or the actual capabilities of the maneuvering thrusters of a hypothetical rocket. On a given flight path, you have a constrained set of valid roll, pitch, and yaw angles.
A few years ago, I would your use of diaeresis an admirable quirk. But now, especially given the em-dashes, I'm wondering if you're an LLM overtrained on the New Yorker.
(Myself, I've been doing em-dashes since about 2012, I think I found out by accident that you got them on MacOS from option-shift-minus after finding out by accident you could get en-dash from option-minus)
An airliner entering a 30 degree roll over 3 seconds would have passengers pop up or down 25 feet, with at least +0.3 and -0.3G of acceleration. It would come with a "going over the top of the roller coaster" feeling. This is in addition to the roll / rotation.
Yaw is interesting for similar reasons.
Picking out my house, seeing tiny cars on a remote highway, etc. Even 100+ MP cameras and high resolution screens won't come close to that level of detail.
Where that number comes from: they claim 50% reduction in fuel consumption, which sounds doubtful to me, and fuel is about a third of flight costs, and I’m making some generous assumptions around perfect competition.
Thing is with current structure airlines would dilute business class too much and airplane manufacturers would increase density all while decreasing fuel use per passenger - none of which is desirable.
And that's before we talk about night flights when there's nothing to see, flights over water when there's nothing to see and so on.
So yes, I'm sure some people like windows. But the majority have demonstrated that they're just fine flying without them.
I also was on a flight once that had a very bouncy landing with all the windows down - when I didn't realize we were anywhere near the ground yet. I'm not into tuning out reality to that degree, and don't really feel obligated to help anyone else do so either ;)
My response to anyone using that kind of language is "go fuck yourself, you pompous shit," but let me explain more clearly: Me keeping my window open is no more problematic than other people trying to force someone to sit in the dark at noon.
What's odious about your comment is that it presumes one is a "problem" if they don't do what everyone around them is doing. Really, the world doesn't need more conformists, but what we really don't need are more people scolding anyone who has a mind of their own. Somehow your comment manages to distill the union of social bullying and cowardice in the fewest possible words. It's interesting. Your language is that of a psychotic conformist, legible to those who don't have that disease.
I was sitting next to a passenger once who was asked by the steward to raise the window shade.
While doing it, they asked "why". Answering for the steward I said "it's so Fire and Rescue can see into the plane if we crash". (Which is true, I used to work at airport fire and rescue.)
The steward looked at me with a "that's not helpful" look. My bad :( .
Although I think it's still useful for people to understand things are done for their safety. Not that we expect to crash, and most don't, but every little thing that might improve survival is done. That encourages rather than discourages me.
And I was rather miffed about missing out on the view outside, because as a technical guy, I totally enjoy seeing all the activity at an airport! Half the fun of flying!
Takeoffs and landings are the biggest risk times (and also the best proximity to Fire and Rescue). In hot environments reducing heat load in the plane can definitely improve comfort. Bummer about missing the action though...
But obviously you can open it to look, and there's only a small number that would apply to.
So it's a factor, but the primary reason is being able to look in.
I get that they don't want people to panic, but I think an attitude of coddling people like that isn't productive.
>> [IATA] recommends keeping the window shades open for takeoff and landing as best practice [...] The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) also does not mandate it. Instead, U.S. airlines are free to set their own policies, and most stop short of making it a requirement.
In practice, that means airlines like Delta, American, Alaska, and Southwest typically leave it up to passengers, although flight attendants may still encourage open shades. United Airlines, which was briefly the only U.S. carrier that asked passengers to raise their shades in 2022 (an order it quickly rescinded in order to align with other carriers and provide more clarity for travelers), now also frames it as a recommendation rather than a rule.
[0] https://www.afar.com/magazine/why-do-window-shades-have-to-b...
Interior isle seats cost as much as window seats in airlines that charge for position. People just want space.
Edit: apparently 12.5% of the population has claustrophobia. If 5% of flyers choose a different airline due to simulated windows that would wipe out any cost benefit from fuel savings.
Ah... A dream
Just hope they don’t make an “ad-free” window a premium upgrade…
Our generation thinks we're so much "smarter", but we're living on an ecological credit card that our children will have to pay, not to mention many of the planet's ecosystems, just so we can all have "memories of actually being in Venice" rather than simply a picture of us in Venice, which in the end is the artifact we have. (If we are that insistent on "being everywhere" and checking off a bucket list, perhaps "Total Recall" was onto something LMAO.)