How about Kanye West's Iplane?
I came across this article (Link below) from October 2018 and thought I would include it as a Lockdown Voice blog because we have to start thinking outside of the box when Coronavirus is all over, even if Kanye West isn't a rocket scientist or aviation expert.
Kanye West, Kim Kardashian's billionaire husband says some bizarre things and doesn't seem clued into Earth's history at the best of times but he is not wrong with this statement, well not completely wrong anyways.
Firstly Apple doesn't make airplanes so I don't think we need Apple Airplanes or Iplanes as Kanye described them but the advances that Apple has made with other products are very impressive.
Think of personal computers, music players, and mobile phones, Apple has revolutionised our lives.
Imagine if Neil Armstrong had an Ipad or Iphone when flying to the moon?
I believe we need to transition from what we have done before to what we can do in the future.
The Boeing 737, first flew in 1967 and has been perfected over years and I am sure it is based on previous planes such as the Dash 80 and 707 going back to the 1950s but the latest 737 model pushed things to the Max and resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives and the grounding of the 737 Max.
Let's push the envelope post Coronavirus, let's modify our designs and start including battery power.
Let's include Solar cells for the minimal power they can currently contribute to plane's batteries while in the air and let's finally embrace the Icloud to replace or compliment Black Boxes.
Every time I watch Air Crash Investigation with my girlfriend, she asks me why they use outdated Voice Recorders that only provide about 30 minutes of audio when they could start adding digital recordings that could show CCTV from the cockpit and not just an audio recording.
Can you imagine having immediate access to the footage from the cockpit?
If we had Black Box digital data it would dramatically speed up all investigations and it could quickly answer questions about the pilots, their actions and their final journey.
Imagine knowing what happened onboard the cockpit of MH370?
Such imagery would be impossible footage to watch but would reveal worst-case scenarios such as suicidal pilots or whether pilots were unconscious when they crashed, something an audio file can't reveal.
It is sometimes almost impossible to retrieve Black Boxes from the ocean depths and mountainous regions where planes have gone down. Millions have been spent on their recovery and I believe the technology now exists to share Black Box data via The Cloud as planes fly through them.
We might be a long way from Kanye West's pie in the sky Iplane but the Ipod instantly revolutionised the Walkman, Discman, and Microdisk market as the Iphone made Nokias look as compact as a phonebooth.
We need cleaner more fuel-efficient planes if we want Greta Thunberg's generation to enjoy the jet-set age as we have, and Coronavirus will provide an opportunity to look to the future and make changes while the 737 Max is still grounded and the MH370 still missing.
Just a thought but perhaps we will go in a different direction altogether and see something strange in the future or even something like airships like in the past as we start to see individuals with wingsuits and working jetpack prototypes.
Designboom article:
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