The system seems to have eaten a long-winded reply I made last night so I'll jot a couple of quick bits down instead. Thank you all very much for the replies, we definitely fell close to the toilet-galley adjacency issue and the bit about motion sickness is very interesting to think about. Windows are a definite but the opening/doming bit is a reasonable point. Could the opening requirement be satisfied by being able to open the rear door in flight and stick a cargo net across it or would that be too risky even for a contingency capability?
I feel like we're drifting away from topic slightly. The missions and payload and suchlike are all dealt with by the specification, perhaps they're not the correct way to go about assembling a modern Maritime Patrol solution but they're what the customer asked for. Training is the major requirement, we're being asked about how cheaply we can run training flights on the basis that in war situations governments stop caring how much things cost. We're mostly interested in the ergonomic/internal operations points that are being made here, crew comfort should perhaps be an afterthought to system performance but it should definitely be a thought. We'd welcome comments from Recon and AEW crews who served in similar airliner-full-of-electronics type aircraft to do with stuff like console placement and the (unfortunately requisite) Planning Table.
Regarding the whole sonobuoy thing, I should think that in this day and age one would be able to programme them using one's smartphone and then GPS track their happy journey downwards. Steering parachutes would probably be possible but aren't really in the scope of our project
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Due to weight limitations it looks as though we will only be able to fit the Flight Engineer's beer
or his harem. You shall have to choose
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