Passenger comfort in a hostile environment

摘要

Long before the Second World War came to an end, designers and engineers were already planning and laying the first building blocks for a new generation of passenger-carrying aircraft. This new breed of airliner would fly twice as fast and twice as high of all that had gone before it. Jet power was coming and by 1949 Britain's first example, the de Havilland Comet, had already made is maiden flight. It had already been established at a very early stage that the most efficient way to operate a jet was at high-altitude; preferably above the tropopause at around 36,000ft. At this height, the sky was a particularly hostile environment with a temperature of approximately -55 degrees.