Next-gen cockpits will be single pilot, posits Thales
Thales Aerospace is busy developing the flight decks for the Sukhoi Superjet 100, ATR 600 series, Sikorsky S-76D and Airbus A350 at its Toulouse facility.

Thales Aerospace is busy developing the flight decks for the Sukhoi Superjet 100, ATR 600 series, Sikorsky S-76D and Airbus A350 at its Toulouse facility. At the same time, the company is working to visualize what the cockpit of a next-generation widebody might look like 20 years from now. The biggest potential breakthrough from this could be single pilot operations for commercial aircraft.

So what current consumer technologies might find their way onto the flight decks of the future? In a press presentation just ahead of the Farnborough airshow, Dennis Bonnet, head of safety and human engineering in Thales’ cockpit center of competence, pointed to examples including the Philips Research Intelligent Shopwindow concept, jewelry that changes color to reflect the wearer’s mood and the driver monitoring system available on Lexus automobiles.