If it was good enough for Captain Picard, it ought to be good enough for Captain Sullenberger. Airbus, one of the largest manufacturers of large passenger jets, has patented a new cockpit design that could both increase a pilot’s situational awareness and highlight the diminishing necessity of physical pilots. The concept uses external cameras that can cover a much wider portion of the sky than any paltry window, can pan and zoom as needed, and even provide dynamic 3D viewing and range-finding. And, of course, it makes airplanes much easier to design. Putting pilots at the front of the plane is necessary when they need to physically look out of the plane. However, this introduces some terrible incentives as far as aerodynamics are concerned, and requires the introduction of less hardy materials than make up the rest of the fuselage. It is also, as we are increasingly learning through the use of big data, not nearly as effective as we normally assume; pilot error accounts for a large portion of the crashes that do occur, and windows offer a fairly limited field of view. If engineers were free to design the perfect nose section without such considerations, however, better shaping and security could result.
