KEEP YOUR FLIPPING CLOUDS

windowless planeBy Bikram Vohra

They have this plan to make a plane without windows, it will just be one wallpaper reflecting the great outside view. So, it will look like you are travelling in a glass tube or a hothouse… in fact, just a long unbroken window. 

What a ghastly idea, from my viewpoint. I don’t find anything exciting about watching clouds scudding by.

The first thing I do if am I in a window seat is pull the shutter down and get some cool darkness so I can sleep. I mean you really have to be a mean sort of person to have a brightly lit tube full of generally dreary people seated against a 360 backdrop of moving 3D wallpaper. Imagine 14 hours of that. And even if you can block out your cloud how do you block out the other idiot’s cloud? This is fluffy nonsense at its worst.

You’d come out of flight zombied out. Imagine it, clouds to the left of you, the sun rising (or setting) to the right of you, a blur called earth down below or just the indistinct sea and if it wasn’t bad enough having muzak, ghastly flowery designs and passengers with BO sitting next to you wanting to make conversation now we’ll have to add on a new dimension to it.

Lovely clouds, what.

Great, my clouds are better than your clouds.

Naaah, look at that beauty, it is huge.

Is that Crete?

No, I think it is Cyprus?

See, there is sky above.

There usually is.

Isn’t this great.

Yeah, sure, now can I read my book.

No Sir, give me a dark cabin with a reading light and keep your clouds and your panorama and believe me, I would much prefer a little window with scratched glass and a little fly fossil trapped within the glass sandwich.

I don’t want to look outside, okay?