"What we want a pilot to do is to look out of the window, because that's where the mission is," says Bowman. "So that drives us into a philosophy that looks more at what information we can put in front of the pilot's eyes."

Although it first flew 20 years ago, the Typhoon's designers had anticipated many of these needs. None of the navigational or system-status instruments seen in older aircraft appears in the jet's cockpit: instead, information is shown on three full-colour monitors and a HUD, or head-up display ‒ a transparent screen placed at eye level which shows text and symbols that are in focus as the pilot looks through it to the skies beyond.

From crash helmet to sensor

There is a drawback to the HUD: the pilot has to be looking straight ahead in order to see the information projected on it. The logical next step, therefore, was to put the HUD into the visor of the pilot's helmet. The Typhoon helmet ‒ designed and built at BAE's plant in Rochester, Kent, with each one individually tailored to precisely fit the shape of every pilot's head - does just that. Cameras inside the cockpit track dozens of diodes on the outside of the helmet, so the computers always know which direction the pilot is looking: the information projected onto the visor moves to match.

"We've moved away from the helmet being a crash helmet and a walkie-talkie into it being a sensor," Bowman explains. "It's now actually one of the integral part s of the system.” Lockheed took this philosophy a stage further on the F-35, which doesn't have a HUD at all. The information that would have been displayed on the HUD, as well as video taken from cameras placed all around the aircraft exterior, is displayed in the helmet, enabling the pilot to "see through" the fuselage, and even to look at the ground below, through the floor of the cockpit.