The first design for the cockpit enclosure was a hemispherical hump atop the fuselage. Trippe was one of Boeing’s best customers and usually the first to order new models, so Boeing put the flight deck of the 747 above the passenger cabin to give the aircraft a hinged nose for a front-loading cargo door. Retired 747 chief engineer Joe Sutter was there just to remind people that Boeing had studied a dual-deck airplane as long ago as 1965 and had rejected it as too heavy.īoeing was competing for a supersonic transport contract in 1965, at about the same time the 747 was conceived, and Pan Am founder and chairman Juan Trippe believed that the big subsonic jets would end up as freighters and that the SST would replace the 747 on passenger routes. They are quite wrong, but the example of the 747 is useful because it points to some important general rules about how airplanes come to be the way they are.īehind the scenes at the Farnborough airshow in England in the summer of 2000, Boeing was keen to share its opinion that Airbus’ weight numbers for the A380 dual-deck jumbo, which is to enter the fleet in 2006, were optimistic. So, I ask them, why does the 747 have an upstairs cabin? Because Boeing planned it that way, they answer. On some airplanes you have to pass through the passenger cabin to reach the bunks or lavatories on others, like the 747, you need never leave the cockpit area and can move freely between the bunk and the bathroom in your pajamas.ARGUING THAT LIFE EVOLVED WITHOUT INTELLIGENT GUIDANCE, say the people who believe in “intelligent design theory,” is akin to arguing that a tornado hitting a junkyard could create a Boeing 747. (When I started to fly 747s, the cockpit lavatory, a standard airplane fitting, contained a most unlikely feature: a baby changing table that was only later removed to save weight.) Many long-haul planes have pilot bunks. Some airplanes have a bathroom inside the cockpit for this reason the 747 is often called the ensuite fleet.
#747 cockpit take off windows
Some planes have windows that open, a blessed feature when you’re dining in the cockpit between flights and wish to feel the breeze on your face, especially if you have flown from somewhere cold to somewhere warm and have only three-quarters of an hour until you must fly home to winter. Airbus cockpits are beloved for their foldout tables, an enormous enhancement to the pilot’s quality of life when completing paperwork or a meal I also found the cup holders and sun visors were more intuitively located on the Airbus. Other differences between aircraft are so small in the context of such Earth-crossing, mile-vanquishing vessels that it feels ungrateful to dwell on them. Before moving the flaps, he turned to me, with a clearing of the throat and a smile-from over the glasses resting halfway down his nose-that said, What are these youngsters coming to? Once, soon after I switched from Airbus to Boeing, flying with a senior captain, I mistakenly asked him to select flaps zero. On the 747, the same position is called flaps up. On the Airbus, the fully stowed position of the flaps is called flaps zero.
There is a friendly rivalry between the pilots of Boeing and Airbus aircraft, which in addition to everything else are two competing realms of language. In a phenomenon called type reversion, a pilot inadvertently refers to a term or procedure from a previous aircraft type. Acquiring these words and their correct usage is a significant part of the work we put into a new type rating.
Indeed each aircraft type or family has its language, or at least its own dialect, and analogous devices and procedures often have different names on different aircraft. The bond between a pilot and his or her current type of airplane is hard to pin down.
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