Glass you can see through
An airliner has small windows set high up, and from the ground you can’t see into it. A Cessna, a Robinson or a King Air is different. They have glass all around the cabin, and when one of them taxis past the airport fence you can see the pilot in a headset, the instrument panel in front of him and whoever sits in the back.
For a long time the glass on our models was only painted on: dark panes, like on a toy, with nothing behind them. Since 21 October it’s different on twelve types. The glass is clear, and behind it is a cabin: an instrument panel under its glare shield, seats, a floor, pedals, in a helicopter the control sticks and the bulkhead at the back. And people in the seats.
Clear doesn’t mean invisible, though. Real glass is slightly tinted and reflects the sky, and the more you look at it from the side, the more it mirrors. Ours does the same. Head on you see inside, from the side the sky shines in it. And because light only gets into the cabin through the windows, it’s dim in there, a big cabin darker than the bubble of a Robinson, just like in photos.
How close are we? On the left, a King Air 350 of the Royal Australian Air Force taxiing at Canberra. Behind the side window of the cockpit sits a pilot in a headset. On the right, our model from the same side: the round cabin windows, the D-shaped cockpit window and behind it a head with a headset.
We also made sure the cabin stays inside. Every seat, panel and person has to fit within the fuselage, even where it narrows towards the nose. Anything that would poke out through the side gets smaller, and where that isn’t enough, it’s left out. And the edge of the glass runs exactly where the painted window used to be, so from outside the aircraft hasn’t changed shape by a centimetre.
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Who sits up front
A helicopter pilot nearly always sits in the right-hand seat. The right hand holds the cyclic, the stick between the knees, which can’t be let go in flight. The left rests on the collective, which can be released for a moment, and that hand then reaches the radio and the switches in the middle of the cabin. In an aeroplane the captain commands from the left seat.
Our 3D view keeps to that. A Cessna, a Cirrus, a Piper or a King Air has its pilot on the left, a Robinson, a Bell or a rescue EC145 on the right. The pilot’s seat is never empty, however empty the rest of the aircraft is.
The clothes differ too. Pilots of small aircraft, of the Robinson and of the Bell 206 and 407 wear headsets. The crews of the EC145 and Bell 429 rescue helicopters sit in helmets and red overalls, as rescue crews wear them in many countries. The vintage P-51 Mustang has a single pilot in a helmet under its bubble canopy. The T-6 Texan, a trainer, is a tandem: the student in front, the instructor behind.
Robinson R44 · Bell 206
Bell 407 · EC145
Bell 429 · Cessna 172
Cirrus SR22 · Piper PA-28
King Air 200 · King Air 350
P-51 Mustang · T-6 Texan
In a helicopter you can tell from the side where the pilot sits. On the EC145 the crew in helmets fill the front and the cabin. A Bell 407 carries passengers besides its pilot, and since he sits front right, from the left side it’s mostly the passengers you see.
One, two, or a full cabin
How many people are on board is something an aircraft doesn’t transmit. Its transponder sends position, altitude, speed and callsign, but not a passenger count. A four-seat Robinson sometimes flies with just the pilot, sometimes with a whole family.
So that is how we draw it. Every aircraft gets a crew of its own, anything from one person to a full cabin, and every number is as likely as any other. A King Air 350 has ten seats, two in the cockpit and eight in the cabin, so between one and ten people sit in it. Who sits where is drawn too, and the pilot is always among them.
The draw is made once and it sticks. It comes from the address the aircraft transmits, which belongs to it alone, not from the clock or a coin tossed in your browser. When you come back to the same aircraft tomorrow, next week or on another computer, the same people sit in the same seats. If we drew again every time you looked, the passengers would jump from seat to seat whenever the camera moved.
In the King Air the passengers sit at the round windows on both sides of the aisle, and up front, behind the D-shaped side window, the two pilots.
The same goes for the other types. A Cessna or a Robinson carries one to four people, a T-6 one or two, and a P-51 has a single seat, which is always taken.
A King Air’s day
In the morning a King Air stands on a stand by Terminal 3 in Prague. The engines are off, the propellers still, the cabin empty. That’s what an aircraft that hasn’t gone anywhere overnight looks like, and it’s also all we know about it at that moment: it’s standing there.
Nobody sees the people board, but we can tell when they’re inside. As soon as the aircraft starts rolling along the taxiway, the engines are running, the propellers turning and the crew sits in the cabin. Through take-off, in the air and on landing they stay in their seats. When the aircraft rolls onto its stand and stays put for a while, the engines wind down and the cabin empties. And when a tug starts pushing it back off the stand, the crew is already aboard, even though the engines aren’t running yet.
We thought of the wait by the runway too. An aircraft that stands at the holding point for a minute before take-off still has its engines running, so nobody disappears from the cabin. It only empties after a longer stop.
In the pictures below it’s the same aircraft with the same people throughout. In the morning it leaves its stand and takes off from runway 24, in the afternoon it comes back at over three kilometres, towards evening it touches down on the same runway, and at dusk it stands where its day began. Empty.
Morning · on the stand, then taxiing
Take-off · back in the afternoon
Evening · landing, then the stand again
In the evening the glass changes too. As it gets dark it darkens and reflects the night sky instead of a blue one, and the cabin behind it sinks into shadow. That’s how it is for real: at night pilots dim the lights in the cockpit so they can see out.
One more thing you won’t notice at first sight. Clear glass with a cabin and people behind it is extra work for your computer. So it goes only to the aircraft you follow or select, and to any aircraft that is at least about three hundred pixels long on your screen, roughly a fifth of a laptop window. The rest keep their painted glass, just lighter than before. On an apron full of aircraft only the nearest ones get a cabin, and the scene doesn’t slow down because of it.
In an aeroplane the pilot sits on the left, in a helicopter on the right. In our 3D too.