The Airplane - Jay Spenser [86]
The flight engineer’s job on the Stratoliner was to manage the airplane’s engines, fuel, pressurization, cabin temperature, electrical, and other systems to free the pilot and copilot to concentrate on the flying. Large commercial airliners would have three-person flight crews for decades to come.
This is not to say that airliners never had three or more people in the cockpit before. Before World War II, many long-range transports carried dedicated navigators and radio operators. However, those peripheral cockpit positions were not central to the basic operation of the airplane or its systems.
The Boeing 314 Clipper, last and largest of Pan American Airways’ ocean-spanning flying boats of the 1930s, had perhaps the biggest cockpit of any airplane. Behind the pilot and copilot was an area grand enough to be the bridge of a ship. Arrayed around this open space were stations for a radio operator, a navigator, and a flight engineer. Although the idea arose with the Model 307 Stratoliner, the Model 314 Clipper actually entered service first.
Boeing 314 Clipper crews had ample space to stand up, walk around, study large ocean navigation charts spread across a plotting table, shoot the stars or sun with a celestial navigation octant, and so on. At night, blackout curtains cordoned off the pilots from the rest of the crew area so that the aft cockpit’s lights would not compromise their vision.
As if that weren’t enough, a door at the rear led to sleeping quarters for a relief crew because flights could last upward of twenty hours. All of this existed above the Clipper’s passenger areas, an idea Boeing later revisited in the design of its 747 jetliner.
World War II profoundly changed the aviation scene. Wartime funding and urgency again accelerated the development of flight technologies, creating larger and more capable transport planes.
After the war, Boeing brought out the Model 377 Stratocruiser. Blunt and fast, this barrel-chested airliner of the late 1940s embodied technology developed for the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, the most sophisticated airplane of World War II. The Boeing Stratocruiser would be the largest, heaviest, and most powerful piston-engine airliner of all time, and it too featured a noteworthy cockpit.
When the Stratocruiser came into being, virtually everyone who crewed it had prior experience on the ubiquitous but far smaller Douglas DC-3 airliner or its military cousins. In wet weather, the pilots of those famous Douglas transports often donned rain gear because the cockpit windows tended to leak. If those fliers thought that stepping up to the pressurized and presumably leakproof Stratocruiser would keep them dry, they were sadly mistaken.
In high-altitude cruise, moisture in the cabin air gradually condensed against the inside of the airplane’s cold metal skin. As its nose pitched down on descent, this moisture slid forward to rain down on both pilots. Equally miserable was time spent on the ground at hot airports because the Stratocruiser’s heavily glazed cockpit mercilessly exposed its crew to the sun. It was ironic that an airplane so comfortable for the passengers could so torture its crew.
But where the Boeing 377 cockpit truly stands out is in its sheer complexity. Hands down, it placed heavier demands on flight crews than any other airliner in history. Fortunately, air transport pilots would never again have to contend with so many gauges, levers, switches, dials, procedures, and checklists because technology was about to give this “aerial office” a makeover.
Introduced at the end of the 1940s, the Boeing 377 Stratocruiser was the largest and most powerful of the great piston airliners that flew after World War II.
Boeing
This relief came as the by-product of the commercial jet age. It would be the first of two major leaps toward greater flight deck simplicity.
Germany and Great Britain both fielded operational military jet aircraft