The Airplane - Jay Spenser [129]
Head-up displays can also show infrared or other alternative-spectrum imagery to jetliner flight crews. Called enhanced flight vision systems, capabilities of this type are being developed and tested. Unlike synthetic vision, enhanced flight vision systems do depict what is actually out there even if it is not visible to the naked eye.
Technology integration is transforming our lives, not just aviation, and the pace of change has never been greater. Where will it lead? The sky’s the limit.
14 TODAY’S STATE OF THE ART
THE BOEING 787 DREAMLINER
The easier it is to communicate, the faster change happens.
—JAMES BURKE, BRITISH SCIENCE HISTORIAN
AND BEST-SELLING AUTHOR1
Within a human lifetime, the idea of traveling between continents by air has gone from unthinkable to normal; in fact, what is unthinkable now is to travel very long distances any other way. Flights whisk us effortlessly across the Atlantic, Pacific, and North Pole, reducing those once-absolute barriers to mere hours spent aloft. Today’s most capable jets can fly 10,000 miles (16,000 kilometers) nonstop; in less than a day, they can deposit hundreds of people at a time almost halfway around the globe from where they took off.
How did we accomplish this? Scientific knowledge and technological prowess are what leap to mind, but those are not the entire answer. In fact, none of it would have happened if human interaction hadn’t evolved just as dramatically. As a consequence of our improving ability to communicate and collaborate, the pace of change has grown exponentially since the dawn of human flight, an accelerating trend that continues today.
The industrial revolution, early aviation’s backdrop, could not have happened without the printed word. Technological advancements on this front brought the daily newspaper into being early in the nineteenth century, accelerating the proliferation of information. The more people knew, the more serendipitous and often highly productive connections that were made.
Thinking from many parts of the world solved flight’s challenges, of course, but those human ideas flowed at a very leisurely pace back then. Late in the nineteenth century, a handwritten letter from Lawrence Hargrave took about six weeks to reach Octave Chanute via steamship and railroad. Chanute’s reply took just as long to return from Chicago to Sydney. Time frames between Europe and Australia were about the same.
In marked contrast, scientific colleagues today would probably communicate via e-mail, a medium that allows our thoughts to flow as fast as we can type them because it has decoupled the written word from any physically transported medium. Better still, our e-mails go simultaneously to as many parties as we like, and we also have other options at our fingertips such as instant messaging and global phone service. Even more ideas and information reach us through the broadcast media and the World Wide Web.
Yes, thoughts fly vastly faster today, but that’s just part of the answer, because a spectrum of new tools and processes also helps us work together more efficiently and effectively. Personal and mainframe computers let us accomplish tasks with astonishing speed and extend capabilities not previously available. Prodigious computer processing power and memory allow us to reduce vast amounts of data, perform aerodynamic modeling, and even design airplanes in three dimensions using software that also supports manufacturing innovations.
Aeronautical engineers designing airplanes work from all parts of the world, yet they collaborate as efficiently as if they were in the same room. These widely distributed teams hold virtual meetings using Web-based tools that allow each participant to view the same charts and discuss them freely. Some collaboration softwares include an inset window showing the person speaking at the time, not just the data that person is presenting. These new tools are revolutionizing how technologists collaborate. Whereas people once flocked to the work, today they let the