For most intercontinental flights I've been on, at least half the flight the windows are closed to block the sun so people can sleep or watch the screens. They could design a viewing area at the edge and fill the interior (where passengers sit) with natural light from light tubes. Combine that with a few more cameras so you can view the exterior from different angles, and I don't think anyone would complain.
>Combine that with a few more cameras so you can view the exterior from different angles, and I don't think anyone would complain.
While this is fantasy: imagine if you could put on an AR headset and be able to "look through the plane" in any direction. Like that F-35 AR helmet. Maybe allow people to use their screens to also look out around the plane using the same system.
I think there may have been an international gentleman's agreement about not putting external cameras on civil transport aircraft.
It may have been more of a Cold War thing, but I seem to remember running into that in a book at some point that there was a tacit agreement to not do that in the interest of not turning civil transport aircraft into mass produced intelligence gathering platforms, therefore in theory rendering them completely neutral in reference to needing to be taken into account in international sales/intelligence gathering.
I may be completely wrong or misinformed on that though; or the info may have been valid, but hasn't aged well taking into account how capabilities have evolved.
I remember flying over Cuba a number of years ago and having the captain tell all the passengers to stow their cameras. Evidently it was part of the agreement that allowed the flight path to cross into their airspace.
On the other hand I had no problems getting some good but very distant pictures of Havana a year and a half ago when our cruise ship sailed past.
I'm the founder of a startup that's working on precisely this issue; high revisit rate and high predictability of commercial flights + internal window-mounted camera arrays = vastly more data at a fraction of the cost of earth-sensing incumbents (Planet). We're @notasatellite on all the platforms if you're interested.
If I was super wealthy, I'd prefer to fly like that over having my own plane. No matter how much money you have, the pilots are probably better, and it would feel like you were economizing.
At least our Thai Airways A380 only had a singular, front-facing camera at the top of the vertical stabilizer. No other view was possible. But this may depend on the plane's configuration.
On Lufthansa and Emirates A380s, there are 4, but I can't remember exactly the views. One is forward from the vertical stabilizer, one is straight down from the belly of the plane... I want to say another is front landing gear or cockpit?
Definitely would be cool around takeoff and landing IMO. At cruise things tend to look about the same for while though.
That said the last time I flew east to west across the U.S., I was glued to the window as we crossed Utah. Killer views of canyonlands and mountain ranges. I found it was at least as impressive to view them from 35k feet as it was on the ground.
Imagine hitting your head into the person next to you because you can barely move without touching others while travelling via plane.
Also I see no added value of doing this on a plane as opposed to doing the same thing at home with the flight path pre-recorded or even being able to pick from multiple pre-recorded ones.
As an adult, my neck doesn't bend in a way that would allow me to look out the window no matter where I sit. I wouldn't have any interest in a simulated view, but a large screen with a camera feed would be great. I am increasingly anxious about flying, but I haven't lost my interest in seeing outside. Seeing nothing but the interior makes it worse.
That part where we're crossing Greenland, and you can see glaciers coming down and icebergs in the ocean? Yeah, that was a lot longer than two minutes...
