transformations, including an early innovation that proved unpopular with pilots—enclosing the cockpit; pilots wanted to feel the wind and the rain. Later, the flight-deck area expanded with the addition of navigators, radio operators and flight engineers. Boeing’s post–World War II Stratocruiser managed to accommodate 13 people in its flight deck during a test flight. At the dawn of the jet age, a flight-deck crew of three on commercial jets was standard, two pilots—and a flight engineer who faced sideways and monitored dozens of analog dials and gauges. Eventually, given the many advances in flight-deck technology, regulators allowed jetliners to be operated with only two crew members on the flight deck—a considerable savings for airlines. Pilots play a big role in flight-deck development at Boeing. They are represented on teams with authority over design and certification, normal and non-normal procedures, and flightcrew training. Carriker, for example, is helping design the flight-deck displays and flight controls on the 777X, the new twin-aisle jet in development. “As far as Boeing is concerned,” said Darcy-Hennemann, “engineers and pilots are partners.” She began 44 Frontiers June 2014 her Boeing career in engineering. Carriker is also an engineer. Flight-deck innovations are intended to help the aircrew make better decisions to manage their flight, Myers said, but added: “It’s also our job to evaluate these applications very carefully so we don’t increase the workloads of pilots.” One thing Boeing airline customers don’t want to see changed is the overall “look and feel” of flight decks, Carriker said. Maintaining the same configuration from model to model and year to year reduces the cost of pilot retraining. “Worldwide there are already 90,000 pilots trained to fly the 737,” Carriker noted. “Each one probably has $100,000 invested in their training. Nine billion dollars of invested capital is a major constraint to big changes in the physical flight deck.” The 777X flight deck, Carriker said, will have enough commonality with the 787 Dreamliner to enable pilots to move between models with only five days of training. Meanwhile, changes in flight-deck technology, such as real-time connectivity, aren’t happening all at once. “We’re so used to connectivity on personal devices in our daily lives, we expect it everywhere,” said Tim Anstey, an Associate Technical Fellow with Commercial Airplanes’ Cabin and Network Systems. “But in reality, the world’s fleet isn’t connected all the time everywhere in the world.” Access to reliable, affordable bandwidth around the world isn’t yet consistent, and thinly populated areas have insufficient ground infrastructure, Anstey said. Cost to carriers and the regulatory environment are other constraints. But the benefits, he said, are so dramatic that additional connectivity-based changes to the flight deck are inevitable. Carriker agreed. “The flight deck of the future will look like a Boeing flight deck today,” he said, “but the guts and the information displayed to the flight crew is going to be different by orders of magnitude. We keep improving on a fundamentally fantastic flight deck.” n kathrine.k.beck@boeing.com PHOTO: Suzanna Darcy-Hennemann pauses for a photo in the flight deck of the first 777-200LR (Longer Range) in 2005. MARIAN LOCKHART/BOEING
Frontiers June 2014 Issue
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