The CPI of the UK presents its case for windowless airliner fuselages

CPI Windowless Fuselages

The Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) has visualized and presented a case for windowless jetliners for the future to save fuel and also to offer a better passenger experience. The CPI has issued this concept on it website:

CPI logo

Imagine a cabin where the windows are display screens, relaying a choice of views from around the aircraft. If you’re not sitting in a window seat, your large seat-back display becomes your window on the world as well as a source of entertainment.

Supplement this with subtle cabin lighting from gently glowing walls and you create a unique travel environment. Screens that are ultra thin, very light and highly flexible are integrated with the fuselage or the seat backs with no unsightly, clumsy or heavy housings.
Less weight more savings

Weight is a constant issue on any aircraft. Over 80% of the fully laden weight of a commercial airliner is the aircraft itself and its fuel. For every 1% reduction in weight, the approximate fuel saving is 0.75%. If you save weight, you save fuel. And less fuel means less CO2 emissions into the atmosphere and lower operational cost… everyone wins.

CPI is a member of the UK’s prestigious High Value Manufacturing Catapult, a network that combines seven world class centres of industrial innovation to accelerate the commercialisation of new and emerging technologies into world beating products, for aerospace and other high value industries. CPI owns or has access to the best research and development facilities in the UK, aviation products and processes can be tested for proof-of-concept within CPIs laboratories and validated at scale through to commercial exploitation, on the ground and in the air.
CPI and the High Value Manufacturing Catapult would use their extensive networks to create a consortium of partners to deliver the benefits of such a programme. By creating an efficient manufacturing supply chain for windowless fuselage technology, the solutions developed can be rapidly commercialized.

Images: CPI.

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