The invention concerns a cockpit for a civil transport aircraft, that is to say for a commercial aircraft transporting passengers, their baggage and/or goods. The cockpit is the space reserved for the pilots. It contains all the controls (controls for actuating control surfaces, lift-increasing flaps and the like, controls for actuating the landing gear, the engines, the air-brakes, etc.) and the instruments necessary for piloting the aircraft.
The architecture of aircraft has been fixed for many years, in particular as regards the position of the cockpit in aircraft. In order to give pilots good visibility of the outside scene forward of the aircraft, the cockpit is conventionally always located at the front of the fuselage, in a zone of the aircraft called the nose, provided with wide front and lateral window panes giving the pilots an unobstructed view not only forward of the aircraft, but also downward for the phases of landing and locomotion on the ground. In all that follows, “nose” is used to mean the whole of the front part of the fuselage, of modifiable form, configured to receive the crew, which extends forward generally from the rear partition of the cockpit or of a resting area for the crew in a conventional aircraft, and which comprises a radome and a housing for a front landing gear.
For aerodynamic reasons, the nose should ideally be lancet-shaped. However, the housing in the nose for radar, a landing gear and especially for the cockpit, requires a much more complex shape and structure to be provided, with numerous radii of curvature. In particular, the presence of the cockpit requires a windshield assembly to be provided having a large surface area in order to give operational physical visibility and to meet the rules and requirements for certification, such a glazed surface being very heavy which requires numerous structural reinforcements to be put in place which increase the mass of the aircraft still further, and make the nose one of the most complex parts of the aircraft to produce.
In order to optimize the view outside and in particular to limit the problems of optical distortion and the impact on the aerodynamics of the aircraft, the known windshield assemblies preferably comprise front panes which are flat or have a dual curvature with large radii, and this adds still further to the weight for the glazed part. The known windshield assemblies are complex parts to produce, which integrate poorly into the ideal aerodynamic shape of an aircraft and which weaken the nose due to discontinuities of shape and structural strength properties (the windshield assembly being a “non-working” surface) that they give rise to.
What is more, the positioning of the cockpit at the front of the aircraft extending in line with the passenger cabin reduces the size of that cabin all the more and the number of passengers capable of being received or their comfort, thereby limiting the financial profits for the airline company exploiting the aircraft.