Timeline for Why, until recently, were smooth nose sections not popular?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 2, 2018 at 5:06 | comment | added | jwenting | @ymb1 in fact, even in the late 1990s Cessna 172 I train in there is clearly visible distortion in the curved areas of the windshield. Not enough to make it useless, but noticeable | |
| Jul 2, 2018 at 5:03 | comment | added | jwenting | @ymb1 and many of those early canopies have horrid optical qualities. | |
| Jun 29, 2018 at 19:51 | comment | added | anon | @dn3s Yeah, how do you think they survive so many movies? | |
| Jun 29, 2018 at 17:57 | comment | added | user371366 | @alephzero i didn't realize that civil passenger planes had such long combat lives! | |
| Jun 28, 2018 at 17:19 | comment | added | user71659 | @ymb1 Military aircraft do not have the birdstrike and pressurization redundancy requirements that civilian airliners do (which has led to accidents and deaths), so their transparencies can be made much thinner, and often out of a single layer. Modern civilian windshields have around 8 layers, consisting of at least two layers that can withstand full pressurization loads. | |
| Jun 28, 2018 at 16:51 | comment | added | anon | @ymb1 Even worse. They need to make them as fast as possible and as cheaply as possible, so some "mistakes" -- or even just intentional choices in design, where something was chosen over functionality -- are par for the course. | |
| Jun 28, 2018 at 16:15 | comment | added | user14897 | @alephzero - by wartime I mean the haste associated with production. | |
| Jun 28, 2018 at 15:38 | comment | added | alephzero | @ymb1 in wartime, winning is more important than economic efficiency. The combat life of military aircraft is of the order of a few hours, compared with a few decades for a civil passenger plane. Almost all military flight is training, not combat, but you don't design a fighter aircraft to be an efficient training platform. | |
| Jun 28, 2018 at 10:45 | comment | added | user14897 | I don't know, Plexiglas was used early on and on wartime aircraft with complex curvatures. | |
| Jun 28, 2018 at 10:37 | comment | added | jwenting | @ymb1 different materials. Glass and early clear plastics are extremely hard to get into a delicately curved shape and maintain transparency without a lot of distortion. | |
| Jun 28, 2018 at 10:31 | comment | added | user14897 | The noses are smooth already, they could start from the top and cutout where the windshield would go. | |
| Jun 28, 2018 at 10:27 | history | answered | jwenting | CC BY-SA 4.0 |