Airplane Window Shades Should Be Legally Mandated To Stay Open During Takeoff And Landing

Commercial aviation is one of the greatest achievements of humankind, but air travel can be absolutely miserable in the modern day. It is genuinely spectacular that we’ve invented a way to safely transport hundreds of people some 30,000 feet above the ground at hundreds of miles per hour. But one source of misery beyond ground-based annoyances is aircraft windows, or, more specifically, how their shades are used. I think all commercial flights should be legally mandated to have their window shades open during departure and arrival, and yes, I can back up this hot take.

This subject recently touched down on my desk after an industry colleague wrote a take that advocated for the deletion of windows entirely from an aircraft. As someone who does sit behind the controls sometimes, I cannot think of something that I would hate more than to trust screens and cameras as my only methods to see the outside world. Aircraft windows have proven their worth for longer than a century, and engineers have made windows, like the rest of aircraft, remarkably safe.

Aircraft windows aren’t just there for you to look out of. I mean, that part alone makes windows worth keeping, but there’s more. Having windows and having those window shades open provides an important safety element to the passengers and the crew during emergencies. Likewise, as I learned recently, if window shades were mandated to stay open at least until the plane got into the air, some passengers might have a better experience without spending a single dime more.

Getting Sick Opened My Eyes

Being an auto writer has afforded me a life I did not know was possible. I am very privileged to say that, whenever I fly, I can usually score the best non-first-class seat in the house. You can usually find me in Seat 7A on most narrowbody airliners. I love the window seat because, as a bigger person, I like that I can “spill out” into a side of my seat without impeding on someone else.

Likewise, I spend a lot of time looking out the window, finding myself fascinated with airport environments, with mountains, and with seeing Illinois from so far up. Some of my favorite aviation photos were taken from inside of another plane. It’s great, and I could never do that if a real window were not there.

Every once in a while, I do find myself outside of a window seat. Those times usually involve last-minute bookings or when an automaker puts me on an airline I do not have status with. If I’m lucky, I’ll dodge the dreaded middle seat and get an aisle seat. But in both cases of middle seats and aisle seats, I’ve noticed that something weird happens to me under a specific set of circumstances.

Back in August, I covered the record-breaking JCB Hydromax. That trip required me to fly to Salt Lake City, which was a Delta Air Lines hub. The JCB team booked me on a Delta flight, which made sense, but was a bummer for me because I normally fly United or, formerly, Spirit. I accepted my fate of not getting a window seat.

On both flights, the vast majority of window seat passengers immediately closed their window shades before the planes even pushed back from their respective gates. This was a bit abnormal for me, as usually, even when I’m not in a window seat, someone nearby has their shade open. That was not the case on either flight.

I didn’t think much of it, and then the aircraft started moving. In both the flight that departed Chicago O’Hare International Airport and the flight that departed from Salt Lake City International Airport, taxi times were long, and the plane made several turns down different taxiways. The flight out of Salt Lake actually got delayed by a ground stop in Chicago. But since we were taxiing at the time, the plane just parked somewhere.

I say “somewhere” because I had no idea where we parked. Since everyone had their window shades closed on both flights, I could feel the aircraft moving, but I couldn’t tell they were turning right or left. I had no idea where the aircraft was in relation to the gates we left, and couldn’t even begin to guess ground speed or acceleration. This sent my head for a spin and, as I became further disoriented, I also started feeling nauseous.

Thankfully, the Salt Lake-bound flight went off without a hitch. It felt deeply weird that the last time I saw the sun was in Chicago, and that it was like I slowly teleported to the gate in Salt Lake.

The flight departing Salt Lake made me hit my limit. As the Boeing 737 released its brakes and started rolling out of wherever it was held during the Chicago ground stop, I kindly asked the person at the window seat to open the window shade because I was feeling really off. Within a few minutes, I had my bearings. Then, we blasted off into the sky; they closed their shade, and it was smooth sailing.

Why You Might Get Sick If You Can’t See Out Of A Plane

What happened is something that many travelers have experienced before. Our very own Bishop told me that he’s gone through a similar experience more than once. There’s a scientific reason behind it, too. What we experienced is a sensory illusion, and it’s generally caused by your eyes seeing (or not seeing) one thing, and your body experiencing another.

As the Vestibular Disorders Association writes, these feelings relate to how the human body’s vestibular system works:

Your sense of balance is maintained by a complex interaction of the following parts of the nervous system:

– The inner ears (also called the labyrinth), which monitor the directions of motion, such as turning or forward-backward, side-to-side, and up-and-down motions.
– The eyes, which monitor where the body is in space (i.e., upside down, right-side up, etc.) and also directions of motion.
– The skin pressure receptors such as in the seat and feet, which tell what parts of the body are down and touching the ground.
– The muscle and joint sensory receptors, which tell what parts of the body are moving.
– The central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord), which processes all the bits of information from the four other systems in order to coordinate it.

Some people describe a balance problem by saying they feel dizzy, lightheaded, unsteady, or giddy. This feeling of imbalance or disequilibrium, without a sensation of turning or spinning, is sometimes due to an inner ear problem. “Vertigo” comes from the Latin verb “to turn.” People who experience this often say that they feel like they or their surroundings are turning or spinning. Vertigo is frequently due to an inner ear problem. Dizziness, vertigo, and motion sickness all relate to the sense of balance and equilibrium. Researchers in space and aeronautical medicine call this sense spatial orientation, because it tells the brain where the body is “in space” — what direction it is pointing, what direction it is moving, and if it is turning or standing still.

The symptoms of motion sickness and dizziness appear when the central nervous system receives conflicting messages from the visual system and the vestibular system in the inner ears. For example, suppose you are riding through a storm in an airplane and the plane is being tossed about by air turbulence. Your head is moving, triggering the hair cells in your inner ear. Your body is moving, triggering your skin and muscle receptors. But your eyes do not detect this motion because all you see is the inside of the airplane. Thus, your brain receives conflicting messages from these four systems and you might become “air sick.”

In short, when you cannot see an outside reference, or you just see a static plane interior, your eyes tell your brain that you’re not moving. But your other senses do detect motion.

As SKYbrary Aviation Safety notes, the vestibular system has its limitations. When an aircraft is flying straight and level in clean air, the only force you’re experiencing is the vertical pull of gravity. However, when the aircraft turns, climbs, descends, hits turbulence, or is just navigating a taxiway, more forces are being introduced. If you cannot see what’s going on outside, your vestibular system is missing a key piece of information for how to interpret what’s going on.

If you can’t see outside, it’s entirely possible for the aircraft to turn or change speeds gently enough that you won’t “sense” it. Alternatively, the aircraft could accelerate or decelerate in a way that makes you think the aircraft is climbing or descending when it actually isn’t. Without a visual reference, this could make you sick as a passenger. As a pilot, it’s a phenomenon known as a somatogravic illusion (pictured below). There’s also the somatogyral illusion, where the plane can bank one direction, but you feel it’s banking in the opposite direction. It’s weird stuff.

This can get especially dangerous for pilots because a pilot may think that a rapidly descending aircraft is actually pitching up toward a stall, and may react by pushing the controls forward, actually deepening the dive. Alternatively, a pilot suffering from a Somatogravic Illusion may feel that their aircraft that’s already climbing too steeply is actually descending, and may pull back on the controls, actually initiating a stall or making an existing stall deeper.

Thankfully, pilots are trained to trust their instruments in cases when their body’s senses cannot be relied on. For a passenger, opening the window shade — assuming there’s something to see outside  can be enough to reset your head.

This alone would be enough for me to mandate that windows stay open for takeoff and landing. Look, nobody wants to find out what their seat neighbor had for breakfast. But there are valid safety reasons to do this, too.

Windows Aid In Safety

A couple of years ago, I wrote an explainer for why the flight attendants of some airlines request that you open your window shade for takeoff or landing. As I noted back then, there is a safety culture in aviation. The procedures and the regulations that pilots, even students like myself, have to deal with have sometimes been written in blood. One important area of safety is what’s known as the critical phases of flight, which the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration defines as:

As defined in the regulation, critical phases of flight are all ground operations involving taxi, takeoff, and landing, and all other flight operations below 10,000 feet except cruise flight.

These phases are “critical” because, during takeoff, taxi, and landing, there is a lot going on; the aircraft might be in a low-energy state, and the aircraft might not have a lot of altitude. Errors or severe malfunctions can be fatal here. If an engine fails during the takeoff run, the pilots need to be able to make the decision to continue or to stop the aircraft. If a landing is unstable, unsafe, or impeded by birds or drones, pilots need to be able to perform a go-around or a missed approach.

This is why the United States enforces what it calls the Sterile Flight Deck Rule. Pilots can’t be chatting about what they’re going to do this weekend when they’re 500 feet from landing or in the middle of rotating off the runway. Movies often depict aviation emergencies happening at cruising altitude, but often, the greater danger is an emergency happening near the ground where pilots do not have the luxury of airspeed, altitude, or time to work out the issue.

Flight attendants are another piece of the safety puzzle. In an emergency, they will be the ones giving you the instructions that can save your life. They will be coordinating the evacuation that, ideally, should be completed in less than 90 seconds. But their job goes far beyond just pointing you to an exit and telling you to leave your bags behind. During the outbreak of an emergency, flight attendants serve as extra pairs of eyes for the pilots.

Despite having expansive flight deck windows, pilots of common twinjets usually cannot see what’s going on with their engines. If the aircraft experiences an uncontained engine failure, for example, they’ll have fault indications that they could draw some conclusions from. However, a flight attendant can also look out of a window, see the damaged engine, see any potential fires, and report back to the flight deck.

In a ditching, flight attendants need to be able to look outside of the aircraft to figure out where the water line is. If they open the wrong emergency exit, that will flood the airplane. In a situation involving a cabin fire, first responders will be able to look through the windows to gauge the fire’s spread and intensity. The crew can also figure out which doors not to open to keep an external fire from getting in. Flight attendants can further tell pilots about visible leaks or structural damage.

An additional benefit is how windows help your eyes. In an emergency, you will need to adjust to the outside world quickly, be it a blindingly bright day or the black of night. Opening your window shade gives you an idea of what to expect. This is also why the cabin crew will usually dim the lights during critical stages of flight.

Of course, none of these benefits are there if the window shades are closed, or worse, there are no windows at all.

I Would Mandate Open Window Shades

Yet, as I reported two years ago, there is no governmental mandate to keep window shades open. The International Air Transport Association, which is a trade organization representing 300 airlines, and the United Nations International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) recommend requiring open window shades during critical phases of flight.

Currently, it’s up to each airline to require open shades or not. Countless international carriers, including airlines like British Airways and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, require shades to be open during critical stages of flight. Some U.S. domestic carriers either don’t have a window shade rule or don’t really enforce one they do have. If you’re riding with a carrier that follows ICAO recommendations, chances are, the airline has a policy requiring the window shades to be open during critical stages of flight.

Thankfully, modern technology makes this so much easier. Aircraft like the Airbus A350 and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner don’t have shades at all, and instead, they have electronically dimmable window tint. The flight attendants can override whatever setting you have the window on to force all windows into a fully transparent state.

This is one of those situations that seems to have countless advantages and only a few disadvantages. Yes, having the window open during a takeoff or landing with one side of the plane facing the sun would suck. But it’s a temporary suck, and one that doesn’t suck as much as your seatmate barfing.

To be clear, I am not interested in telling you what to do. If you decide to keep your shade closed, I will live. I have always just thought that the science behind getting sick or disoriented when you can’t see out of a moving vehicle is fascinating. Now, maybe you might know a little more about yourself, too.

Still, if I had way more governmental power than I should ever have, I would require that window shades be open during departure and arrival. Once the plane is out of a critical phase, go ahead and close the shades. Otherwise, let that light in! While I’m in this hypothetical position of power, I would unravel the 25-Year Rule and the Chicken Tax. Look, a girl can dream.

Top graphic image: DepositPhotos.com