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Aviation History
1946
1946 - 0501.PDF
MARCH 14TH, 1946 • FLIGHT Indicator " Discusses Topics of the Day 257 Passenger Psychology The Price of Pressurization : Considering the Farepayer's Mental Comfort : Improving Control Cabin Screen Layouts IN this new world of pressurization—or, as it may bemore euphuistically described, cabin conditioning—air-craft designers may obviously need to do a very great deal of thinking, but they will, more than ever, be in need of the advice of psychologists and interior decorators. And that is an aspect of the problem which may not Save occurred to everyone. Unless the greatest possible care is taken in the layout of all future transport aircraft we may find that even those passengers who are not normally . claustrophobically inclined may give up the idea of travel- ling by air except on most vital occasions. The designer, of course, has troubles enough of his own. In order to make a fuselage strong enough to take the very considerable blow-out pressures involved, he is being forced to think in terms of circular or near-circular sections, and to reduce the window areas to an absolute minimum. He may even be compelled to give the crew a quite inade- quate field of vision because of the difficulties involved in making that necessarily unsymmetrical shape around the nose quite strong enough. In fact, I cannot help wonder- ing whether it would not, at least in these earlier stages of pressurization development, be simpler to leave the '' flight deck '' section unpressurized, and to let the crew carry on merely with oxygen supplies and with their much more practised and less sensitive eustachian tubes. There would, of course, be considerable disadvantages in this segregation, but the passengers need not know that they are cut off from the crew with an air-tight door and the stressing problems would thus be considerably simplified. Certainly the average member of the public has no idea of the problems or of the relative pressures involved in pressurization, and I very much doubt whether the Powers who casually demand it have a very much better idea either. Perhaps it is just as well; if the passenger or the politician fully grasped the fact that there is likely to be a pressure of anything up to four tons trying, for instance, to force open the entrance door when flying at 25,000ft, each of them might think again. Conditioning Problems In fact, it would seem that the straightforward structural and layout problems of fuselage design and manufacture involved when dealing with blow-out loads may be the very least of those concerned with pressurization. Tech- nically, the greatest trouble would seem to lie in the finding of ways and means by which the interior air conditions may be kept in a comfortable state. If, for instance, a cabin were to be pressurized, simple and solely, to give 8,000ft conditions at 45,000ft, the occupants might, in all but tropical summer conditions, be uncomfortable to the point of suffering severely, since the air would be quite unbearably dry. Very considerable amounts of water have to be used in any cabin conditioning plant, and the humidi- Scation must be controlled not only for the varying pressure ratios, but also to normalize the intake air condition at different heights. Quite apart from ahy complications involved, the weight of the necessary equipment and of the water supply, with the loss of quite a considerable degree of engine power needed to drive the compressors, Provide the designer with—to use an abominably over- worked word—headaches enough. But, in spite of any technical difficulties which, what- ever the high-powered public relations tycoons may tell us, are being; experienced on both sides of the Atlantic, the problem will duly be solved. The question is whether, in their pride and joy, the technicians may forget other and equally important aspects of passenger comfort involved. Somehow or other the in- terior decoration experts must find means of toning down the evil effects of tubular cabin shapes and small windows on the mental comfort of the passengers. It will be possible to get rid of the horrible perspectives of a circular fuselage by the simple expedient of breaking up the lines by means of a series of bulkheads. This action would reduce the available space and will add to the all-up weight, but I feel that, for any but the shortest of journeys, these sacrifices must be made if passengers are not to be discouraged. One can so easily imagine the extreme case in which an opera- tor, in order to obtain maximum passenger capacity, might demand a hundred-passenger aircraft in which the occu- pants sit in serried ranks running into the far distance. Rather than travel in such an aircraft for more than a continuous period, at the very most, of two hours, I would happily travel by train, boat and coracle, or on my own feet. Slipways Another little matter which will need to be considered when we are thinking in terms of almost universal air travel is that of the differences in attitude of the aircraft between ground and flying conditions. The advantages of the tricycle undercarriage from the handling point of view have from time to time been sufficiently stressed, but is not so often that we hear anything much about its advantages from the passenger-comfort angle. We have all experienced that wild struggle up a some- times slippery aisle between the rows of seats in a conven- tionally-undercarriaged aircraft. With steep entrance ladders, small entrance doors, and this troublesome slope, passenger-flying.' can, even nowadays, be considered only as a means of travel suitable for the comparatively strong and healthy. No doubt before the multitudes are ready to fly everywhere and before the fares are low enough to permit such a doubtfully advantageous millennium, all transport aircraft will have one form or another of level- landing undercarriage. But it may still be a point worth mentioning for the benefit of those technicians who are either unconverted or doubtful, and who have every good practical reason for preferring to build their aircraft with a little wheel at the back and, sometimes, a very pro- nounced ground angle. There is another little matter. After a pilot has spent the better part of six years in different kinds of military aircraft he must suffer something of a shock when he finds that the view from a civil aircraft's " flight deck "—as the control cabin is now so grandly described—is no better than it was in pre-war days, and infinitely worse than it was in his thrice accursed flying gun-platforms. There are one or two notable exceptions to the rule, but certainly the field of view from the captain's seat of the average civil aircraft, whether British or American, is shockingly bad. It is sometimes reduced, in fact, to one through a m^re foot-deep transparent strip with a number of obstruct- ing supports. It is often much too far away from the pilot's eyes, and only more or less at the right level. The roof is usually opaque and.the pilot may^only obtain a view forward and downward by opening a bad-weather window or by pressing his face against a side panel. Yet this same captain, sitting in his roomful of scientific aids and controls, is expected to make decent arrivals on narrow runways, sometimes in the middle of the night and perhaps in heavy rain or border-line visibility. Sometimes the screen is curved and the view he pets may be distorted and mixed up with a lot of minor reflections from the in-
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