Airborne Interiority
After a two-month hiatus, a456 is back with an interesting post about the design history of the airplane cabin.
[Images: A £300-million private jet, complete with onboard car park; via a456 and the Daily Mail].
Among other things, Enrique Ramirez, the blog's author, writes that the "combination of luxury and mechanization" found inside the modern airliner "is problematized by dint of the fact that, like many other technologies in the postwar world, luxury and mechanization had a distinct military origin and purpose." Indeed, "The modern airliner, with pressurized cabins and articulated furniture, is a close relative of the nuclear bomber."
Check it out in full: Designing the Friendly Skies.
[Images: A £300-million private jet, complete with onboard car park; via a456 and the Daily Mail].Among other things, Enrique Ramirez, the blog's author, writes that the "combination of luxury and mechanization" found inside the modern airliner "is problematized by dint of the fact that, like many other technologies in the postwar world, luxury and mechanization had a distinct military origin and purpose." Indeed, "The modern airliner, with pressurized cabins and articulated furniture, is a close relative of the nuclear bomber."
Check it out in full: Designing the Friendly Skies.
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3 Comments:
Interiority? Problematized? C'mon!
Ramirez's observation about the connection between luxury airliner design and the bomber is a secondary point of the essay. That's good, because it's spurious at best.
It's true in that the development of civil air transport is inextricably linked with military flying. But the design of airliners, specifically, has very little to do with military aviation. Precedents for articulated furniture come from trains, ships, and even the Murphy bed, not from military aircraft.
The mid-century heavy bomber's wings, optimized for heavy loads, speed, and long range, meet more or less the needs of a fast airliner. The fuselages and their interiors are fundamentally distinct.
As far as I remember, no - no - bomber/airliner hybrid or conversion saw substantial production. No bomber types succeeded in commercial service as anything more than an expedient. None. Not at any point in aviation history.
Ramirez points to the Boeing 377, of which maybe a few dozen were produced, and then mostly for cargo service. There have been other examples, all of them with heavily modified or all-new fuselages, all of them seeing limited production runs.
Thanks for the link, Geoff. Much appreciated!
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