The FAA thinks FPV should be illegal while the airline industry is filing patents on flying airliners with no windows.
An article published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer the other evening describes a patent application from European aerospace company Airbus in which pilots fly aircraft entirely through electronic means. The patent application, number US20140180508 A1, is titled "Aircraft with a cockpit including a viewing surface for piloting which is at least partially virtual" and notes that while an aircraft’s cockpit must be located in its nose to afford its pilot forward visibility, the physical requirements of the cockpit’s shape and the amount of glass required are aerodynamically and structurally non-optimal.
"For aerodynamic reasons," explains the patent application’s description, "the nose should ideally be lancet-shaped. However, the housing in the nose for radar, a landing gear, and especially for the cockpit, requires a much more complex shape and structure to be provided, with numerous radii of curvature." It would be better, says the patent, if the cockpit were moved into some other area of the aircraft and the pilot equipped with entirely electronic means of observing and controlling the aircraft’s flight.
According to the application, the non-windows cockpit would contain "a screen and associated means for projection (including back-projection)" of various "scenes," including the environment immediately forward of the aircraft, and also "a device with lasers for forming a holographic image" to display items like "a 3D mesh of the earth’s surface," "a hologram representing for example an assistant pilot on the ground," or "a holographic representation…of one or more flight instruments."
The lack of "glazed surfaces" (i.e., glass or other transparent elements) means that the cockpit itself could be free of the "numerous structural reinforcements" required to support the typical weight of glass as opposed to the same amount of aluminum. It also means that the cockpit could be placed literally anywhere inside the aircraft’s volume, including in the cargo hold or even in or near the aircraft’s empennage.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/airbus-submits-patent-application-for-windowless-jet-cockpit/
Comments
Pretty much every current military UAV and UCAV is basically flown FPV via more or less reliable wireless links which can have quite a bit of delay.
The concorde operated just fine with that fuselage shape with windows. Im guessing as some stated earlier that this is really just a money making bet, or a business decision to stifle competition. But windowless cockpit is hardly a new idea, and may not be patentable at all. Lindbergh crossed the atlantic in a windowless cockpit.
There's no reason a 1 percenter wouldn't take the risk on just himself & his 4 passengers for a significant increase in range, while an airline would have to think twice.
Embraer will be 1st with that design, like everything else. The lancet fuselage is inevitable.
Good luck getting certification on that one! The back up systems required to make that feasible and safe might outweigh the gains. The funny part is most airliners are fully autonomous vehicles. They have pilots on board to program, watch over, and fix when the computer makes a flying error, or cannot make the required flight path changes correctly. There is already a group of airliners that can take off/land in zero visibility. Landing is the easy part of that, taxiing is not. While technically feasible, politically it has a long long way to go before being accepted into reality.
they already have a windowless cockpit, it's called a very expensive simulator...
There are two issues with the comparison to FPV flying. The first is that FPV flying is done using relatively unreliable wireless links; a failure there leaves the pilot completely out of control. The second is that hobbyist planes are not built and tested to the same amazing level of reliability as a passenger airliner.
Airliners are held to an incredibly high level of fault-tolerance, with meticulously designed fail-safes or fail-to-known-state systems. The most modern planes basically fly themselves, the pilot is required as a sort of failsafe. The controls are already fly-by-wire. Pilots can already land a plane using only the instruments on the dash. A failure in one system will not prevent the pilot from flying the plane using a backup system.
Perhaps FPV flyers should be required to have a backup failsafe radio control link, and a backup video link.
Wow! that would be a scary thing based on how airlines run these days,I would half guess that maybe they are just covering by getting a patent on it that if the opposition decides it wants to do it then the cash register starts to ring for
Airbus.
Question: Why does Airbus want a patent?
Answer: Boeing.
I can't fly a 1/2lb plastic toy beyond visual line of sight over an abandoned cornfield. But an airliner with 400 people on board moving at 500mph over New York City, that's ok.
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