For the first time on an Airbus aircraft the A350 XWB nose
section's outer shape incorporates a flightcrew escape hatch, as the side
windows are fixed and not openable.
When Airbus reconfigured the A350 in 2008 re-naming the aircraft as XWB Xtra Wide Body, they changed the shape of the upper radius and upper shell of
the fuselage for aerodynamic reasons. And they refined the a six-windscreen
layout and worked to minimize the centre post to improve the pilots'
visibility.
Additionally,
removing the
opening direct vision cockpit windows for flightcrew emergency evacuation and
including an escape hatch in the flightdeck roof instead, there is a weight
reduction.
This
was the result of a trade off after benchmarking the configuration Boeing was
using in the 787.
787 (in the left) and A350 XWB (in the right) includes
the escape hatch in the roof
The whole cockpit canopy section has aluminium alloy skin panels
(in green primer in the photos), which offers "the best solution in terms of the
overall balance between weight/cost/manufacturing process/bird impact test" as
per Airbus.
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