If it floats or flies...
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...draw them the opposite way round!
Why is the direction that these respective craft are depicted in opposite to each other? Aircraft are generally always shown facing to the left, while if it's water-bourne it generally faces to the right.
Must be a good reason, even if not a technical one. Any ideas?
Why is the direction that these respective craft are depicted in opposite to each other? Aircraft are generally always shown facing to the left, while if it's water-bourne it generally faces to the right.
Must be a good reason, even if not a technical one. Any ideas?
DudleySquires said:
...draw them the opposite way round!
Why is the direction that these respective craft are depicted in opposite to each other? Aircraft are generally always shown facing to the left, while if it's water-bourne it generally faces to the right.
Must be a good reason, even if not a technical one. Any ideas?
What I was told in relation to this is:Why is the direction that these respective craft are depicted in opposite to each other? Aircraft are generally always shown facing to the left, while if it's water-bourne it generally faces to the right.
Must be a good reason, even if not a technical one. Any ideas?
The starboard side is the 'senior' side of the ship, where - by tradition at least - the officer of the watch stands, the side the captain's cabin is on, and the side that by naval tradition a commanding officer would embark and leave the ship from. It's also the side that, far back in maritime history before the rudder became commonplace, the steering oar or steerboard (from which comes starboard) would be mounted. So in a drawing where you want to show all the technical details of a ship, you draw the starboard side with the ship facing right (or make a half-model of the starboard side).
Land-based vehicles - cars, railway engines and, by extension of the tradition, aircraft, are treated as if they were horses. Knights and armed horsemen wear their swords hitched to their left hand side, requiring them to mount their charges from the horse's left side. Therefore you approach a horse from its left, and this became the normal way of drawing horses (absent any artistic or technical requirements) and the same applied to other vehicles. This is also why a British merry-go-round rotates clockwise, with the horses facing left.
DudleySquires said:
...draw them the opposite way round!
Why is the direction that these respective craft are depicted in opposite to each other? Aircraft are generally always shown facing to the left, while if it's water-bourne it generally faces to the right.
Must be a good reason, even if not a technical one. Any ideas?
Tradition. There possibly was a reason once, but it was so obvious that nobody considered writing it down and it’s been lost to time, but because it’s always been done that way it stays being done that way.Why is the direction that these respective craft are depicted in opposite to each other? Aircraft are generally always shown facing to the left, while if it's water-bourne it generally faces to the right.
Must be a good reason, even if not a technical one. Any ideas?
Some old ship lines plans from the Hamburg maritime museum.
Aircraft on ships are generally drawn facing the same way as the ship.
I figured that steer-boards might be involved somehow!
Hadn't thought about land-based vehicles, but why would the engineers that drew the first powered flying machines ~120 years ago have chosen to follow the horse and not the boat convention? There must have been more to it than flipping a coin!
Hadn't thought about land-based vehicles, but why would the engineers that drew the first powered flying machines ~120 years ago have chosen to follow the horse and not the boat convention? There must have been more to it than flipping a coin!
DudleySquires said:
I figured that steer-boards might be involved somehow!
Hadn't thought about land-based vehicles, but why would the engineers that drew the first powered flying machines ~120 years ago have chosen to follow the horse and not the boat convention? There must have been more to it than flipping a coin!
It might have effectively been a coin-toss. If the first few draughtsmen to draw aircraft plans had a background in the coachbuilding, bicycle or automotive industry (as many of them did) then they'd just draw what they were used to. It was usually armies that were the early military adopters of aviation, and if they required their drawings to be left-side (as per drawing of horse-drawn equipment) then these things become a standard. Hadn't thought about land-based vehicles, but why would the engineers that drew the first powered flying machines ~120 years ago have chosen to follow the horse and not the boat convention? There must have been more to it than flipping a coin!
That's just guessing on my part, but 'standards' often come down to arbitrary early decisions that stick.
But it's certainly true that while aircraft/aviation adopt a lot of terms and traditions from the maritime industry, on aircraft the 'senior' side is the port, not the starboard. The commander sits on the left, the left is the side that passengers board/disembark from, engines and other systems are counted from the left side and so on.
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