Like, I’m on a plane. I don’t want to watch Toy Story when I can do that at home, I want to see what the pilots see. And that way every seat has technically a window to look out of.
I am just sleeping nowadays, dont give a fuck about movies or anything else. Its 8 hours of nothing, i better go sleeping
How do you manage to sleep, I feel like I never have enough space to do it without disturbing others
Done airlines give you outside views, but shoot with potatoes. So it’s better not having that. Also there is nothing to see at most of the cruise height.
Yeah except the cloud layers. For some that’s beautiful and it makes an even better backdrop for reading
I love to have a window seat and just can’t take my eyes off the landscape below. It’s so amazing to see the plan of farms and cities, the aquaducts and rivers, the crinkled mountains deserts and coastline. Sometimes you can see the shadow of your own plane trace along the ground. Try to guess which lake this is. I guess a night flight is boring.
Agree. Ocean flights are boring as well.
I really enjoy watching the features of the desert when I fly to Vegas. You can almost see the geographic history of how the grand canyon came about. I love the dried up river beds that look like ancient crooked highways.
I fly from Indianapolis to Los Angeles once a year and love this as well. See the topography change over plains states…sometimes the Rocky Mountains if there is a layover in Denver or something. The Grand Canyon and cool landscapes in Utah. Maybe over Vegas/desert…Death Valley. The Sierra Nevada mountain range and “high desert” in California. Then the Pacific Ocean. Kind of amazing and people take it for granted.
On night flights there’s mysterious patterns of lights on the ground. What town is this, is that a stadium? Why is there one solitary light in the middle of nowhere? Why are the streetlights yellowish over there and pinkish over there?
If only my neck wouldn’t hurt so much after staring
Ever since I took an atmospheric science class I’ve come to love the view even when we’re above the clouds. I try to identify cloud formations and guess whether it might be raining/snowing below. Seeing a big ol’ cumulonimbus from that vantage point is cool as hell.
Also, seeing the wing control surfaces moving.
Passing over mountains is the best!
Or the water… the endless water, when you fly over the Atlantic ;)
Me on my flight from Seoul to Stockholm: “oh look, grassy plains. I must be over Russia!”
13 hours later: “oh would you look at that, more grassy plains, still over Russia 😒” Flying over Russia is like flying over the ocean except it’s grass.Sounds like driving through Kansas.
Last.flight I was on had exactly that and several other views from a virtual plane in out virtual location over a 3d virtual earth. Would have been neat but I think it cost me 3-4" of leg room lol
Maybe having all of the passengers watching the pilot’s every move might put too much pressure on them
It’s basically just a windows desktop background.
I’ve often fantasized about a 360 cam mounted on the tip of the vertical stabilizer, and then the crew can offer VR headsets that put you “in” the 360 lookout. It’d be like flying while sitting on top of the plane! Cool even in clouds / inclement weather. Could even stream those feeds to the public for cheap tours of the skies. Would be extra interesting during landing and takeoff, I think. Maybe have a few cams around the plane. Bottom, top, each wing, cockpit, etc.
@helmet91@lemmy.world I was on an Emirates A380 recently (massive, double-decker beast) and they had three selectable cameras: cockpit, downwards and vertical stabiliser (unfortunately not controllable). The vertical one was weird as it felt like being in a racing game or something since it seemed too high to be part of the plane.
They left the camera on the whole time, which was great to watch the landing and taxiing. We must have been in a decent crosswind early in our flight, as the downwards camera was showing the ground go by diagonally.
I can’t remember off the top of my head, but there is at least one airline/airplane that offers a live camera from the tip of the rear stabilizer to those displays. VR is of course a bit much currently, but it would be an awesome experience, no doubt.
Bottom would probably be most interesting because on top you can only see the sky
I remember international flights that had several outside cameras, one looking slightly down and forward was the best by far, although most of the flight it was just clouds and during landing that one turned to face forward so you couldn’t see the runway. Haven’t seen them recently though.
Honestly that’s fucking brilliant. It should be an option of course, not the default, but definitely would be really cool for those who want it.
it’s an option on many airplanes, but the problem is that it looks like the list of the cameras approved for this use by the FAA has been updated in the late 90s, the quality of the feed is terrible, in daytime everything is white, and in night time everything is black
Some have maps which I enjoy watching. When you can’t see the land below you can at least see which random tiny islands you are flying over.
They did on one flight I was on. You could choose from a number of different cameras around the plane and watch the view. Short of take-off and landing, it was pretty dull.
IMO they should make the screen into a phone / tablet mount. And move back the announcement screen back to the isle to comply with regulations, etc.
Some of them do.
Yeah, I’ve seen this on flights since 2010
The A350 with Lufthansa for example had it.
Many do now. They shut it down prior to landing which sucks.
In my country our flag carrier does it because they usually arrive too early and have to circle around which for some reason caused bad reviews.
So they just turned the damn thing off, which makes things worse IMO. This happens with both ouTGoing and incoming flights, unfortunately.
I imagine if the slightest thing seemingly goes wrong it could have a snowball effect.
People rushing in panic in any direction out of fear or curiosity.
Landing a plane that size is hard enough but with all the mass tumbling around makes it even more unpredictable.
The seatbelts aren’t for your safety allone, they also keep your mass in place so the plane doesn’t react unpredictably.
Also a big plus if during the turbulences you’re not getting flailed by the whirling around extremities of a beltless corpse or getting crushed by its torso.
Remember, force equals mass times speed and there can be a lot of accelerstion during turbulences.Possibly. I do recall a commercial aircraft crashing when a bunch of people ran to the back of the aircraft because an alligator got loose. Something to that effect anyhow. Pretty sure was in Africa. Can’t find a source for that.
Overall large commercial are pretty stable. Don’t think you could effect c of g much laterally but possibly longitudinally you could.
Some of them show landing too. I had one that show us descending through a fog bank that was crazy. I don’t know how those pilots do it, balls of steel I guess.
ILS :-)
But you have to trust the instruments and not become disoriented, takes lots of training and practice.
Or Autoland or a HUD landing which both can go down to 0/0, conditions permitting. There’s a lot of tools these days that pilots (especially Air Transport Pilots) can use to fly. And yes, all of it requires fairly extensive training.
And yes, all of it requires fairly extensive training.
Pffft I’ve played Flappy Bird. How hard can it be?
Very few airports are rated for it. Hong Kong is the only one that I know off hand. Mainly because they have so much fog and not great alternatives that they allow it. Very few planes keep up that certification either unless they commonly land in those situations.
That being said, in a crunch, the majority of modern aircraft could likely do it if there was no other choice. Might result in a hard landing and damage but would be survivable.
After watching Mentour Pilot I have an appreciation of just how much training they undergo. It’s basically the closest thing we have to a real Starship Enterprise type setting where the captain seems to have an answer to everything that comes up, because that’s precisely what they aim for.
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I actually have my private pilots licence. Had bought a Piper arrow that was IFR rated. I am not rate IFR but my instructor was.
Flew one flight to a small airport during real IFR conditions with my instructor. Uses GPS for localizer and glideslope. This particular airport minimum was 200 feet. That means if you don’t see the runway by 200, you abort. Anyhow the cloud layer was started at 5000 right down to 300 feet. Was beautiful day with zero turbulence. When we entered the clouds, it literally felt like you were not moving and just in a heavy fog. Your engine is even decreased and quiet as you are descending. You watch the instruments like a hawk because it is easy to lose spacial orientation and death comes shortly after that. The only really movement is watching your attitude decrease which is very eerie. Being we were flying into an unmanned airport, for all you know the clouds go right into the ground so watching for the abort attitude is critical. In this case the cloud layer was particularly low at 300 feet. We broke thru the clouds with 100 feet to spare before abort attitude. Literally about three seconds later we were starting the flare and landing.
You literally rely on your instruments 100 percent and hope that altitude indicator is right on. You have a minimum of two attitude indicators. If they were both to fail in real IFR conditions, conditions where you can’t see the horizon, very few pilots will survive. You can’t feel the horizon at all. There is no way to tell if you are level.On the ultimate failure, you can use slew, altitude, turn indicator, worried to try and fly out of the condition. But few pilots could successfully do that for any extend time.
Years ago I was on a flight that did this. They also showed the altimiter. When they pull the flaps you drop like a stone, and seeing that altimiter drop so fast is pretty unsettling. Last night I flew on a plane that did the same, but they turned off the altimiter view before that point.
They do
