Wow, this is a literal nightmare for flight anxiety sufferers.

Not being sarcastic, my claustrophobia kicked in and my breathing literally became a bit heavier as I imagined sitting in a metal tube without windows. Had never considered how psychologically important windows are, before.

Only if they don't replace them with even larger digital "windows." There's also been work towards electronic windows in aircraft.

Yeah but it'd be cooler if the sides were completely digital "windows".

What should these be called? Dindows? Digidows? Digdows?

I live in the arctic and I was thinking of building a home without windows but with same idea. It allows you to remove convective heat loss from windows almost entirely. Not to mention it's much cheaper than shipping up glass windows.

Windows 2.0.

Televisions?

I could see airlines charging more for "thrill" planes that have 360 immersion "windows" wrapped all around you.

Wonder Woman eat your heart out! (Her flying in that invisible jet in the cartoons always freaked me out when I was a kid)

Or special flights where the windows make it seem like you're flying into space and landing on Mars.

The last flight I was on had the window shutters down and lights off almost the entire flight.

[Off-topic] In the Mass Effect games series, Geth (a synthetic race) warships don't have windows as they are considered a structural weakness. In the game, there are some interesting conversations based on that.

Why not keep a thin horizontal sliver of glass instead of removing it completely. In most flights the blinds will be pulled down anyway. You can still peek outside, and no need for fancy electronics all around the fuselage.

Commercial airlines have a future? In the near future, only the wealthiest people will be able to fly, and good luck denying them windows. As for everyone else, Im thinking theyre taking the windows out because they are planning to convert over to cargo flights or something.

You can fly right now if you want to - flights are very cheap! What point are you trying to make?

You can buy a cheap ticket on an empty plane. Do the math. This is a passing thing, and airlines are either going to raise prices or go out of business.

You can buy a cheap ticket on an empty flight that then gets cancelled.

Why do you think that?

Because COVID has completely rejiggered the economy. Airlines legally are not allowed to pack hundreds of people into a cramped cabin. They're selling fewer tickets at lower prices, and they were already losing money on poor passengers to begin with.

Plus, the oil crash is still coming. Fracking has delayed it for a short time, and the covid lockdowns also have slowed consumption, but it is still inevitable. Before fracking, the U.S. army expected peak oil to happen sometime around 2015. Keep in mind, fracking is less efficient than old methods of oil extraction, and produces fewer barrels for the same amount of energy, and the energy for that extraction process comes from... oil. So we're burning the house down from both ends. Airlines don't stand a chance, in their current form.

Peak Oil? Banging that drum again? This must be at least the 7th major iteration of it.

For all that expense with fracking it still beats the snot out of solar and wind. Until we get over the hysteria around nuclear fossil fuels are going nowhere.

A real game changer could be a discovery in electrical energy storage. Even out the peaks from solar/wind. Solid chemical batteries aren't doing it - there's some cool stuff going on with liquid electrolyte batteries in Australia but I don't think the capacities or efficiencies of them can still beat out fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels are going into the atmosphere, and they dont come back. I had no idea hn was so delusional about energy.

Which is why companies like this are going to be doing what Musk is doing with Electric vehicles.

Now, if they could make these for 2000-3000km flights and they ran on 250kWh to 350kWh electric they'd be what the future entails. Especially if they weren't piloted and were fully automated.

Removing your energy source (fossil fuel) and replacing with energy storage doesn't fix anything - where does the energy to fill that storage come from? In some hypothetical future where renewable energy is very cheap, it will still be more efficient to use that energy to produce liquid fuel for planes.

ITER. Tritium breeding reactors by feeding it recycled lithium.

Exactly. IMHO nuclear is the only way, if we go down this path. And if we do that, then we mostly don't need to bother with wind/solar/grid storage.

Did you hear what I said about COVID? Also your imaginary battery that doesn't exist, is imaginary, and doesn't exist. Unless you want to fly around on a nuke.

And can we stop giving elon musk credit for everything? Tesla employs 48,000 people and contracts god only knows how many. It's pretty clear that elon musk is stealing credit for everyone's work, and Im sure the rest of the company physically cringes whenever people say stuff like "Elon is doing great stuff with batteries"

Eh, kleenex, scotties, brand name recognition is a trite point.

And when it comes to EV batteries, Tesla is leading the field. 21700 batteries are a smart improvement over 18650 cells.

And I'll happily give the engineers at Tesla credit. However, realistically speaking they should be branching out and applying the same technology elsewhere. Especially in regard to hybrid vehicles.

It's not an either/or situation. We can eat our cake and drive it halfway too.