Inside the incredibly elegant cockpit of Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-800

It’s a POV usually reserved for qualified, commercial pilots, but this rare peek into the Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-800 reveals how complicated, yet elegant its cockpit is.

The aircraft is 39.52 m (129 ft 8 in) long with a wingspace of 35.9 m (117 ft 10 in), and it has a maximum of 210 seats.

All that is powered by a LEAP-1B from CFM International engine with 3,500 km (6,480 miles) – and this unique footage shows where the flight crew sits in charge of it all.

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The cockpit of the Boeing 737-800

The video, shared by aviation and flight-simulator content creator, Jviation, pans across the cockpit showing the complex array of knobs, buttons and screens both in front of the pilot and co-pilot and overhead.

While it’s complex it appears perfectly organized – it’s certainly far more spacious than the SR-71 Blackbird’s tiny cockpit.

The Boeing 737 family

Zooming out, the Boeing 737 MAX family ‘delivers enhanced efficiency, improved environmental performance and increased passenger comfort to the single-aisle market’.

It combines ‘advanced technology winglets and efficient engines’ to be cutting edge.

Speaking of efficiency, check out this spectacular cockpit view of a Boeing 777 landing in torrential rain.

The result: ‘excellent economics, reducing fuel use and emissions by 20 percent while producing a 50 percent smaller noise footprint than the airplanes it replaces’.

Financially the 737 MAX family offers approximately 14 percent lower airframe maintenance costs than other planes within the same category.

The passenger experience

What’s more, passengers are kept happy in the air.

They’re treated to ‘the Boeing Sky Interior, highlighted by modern sculpted sidewalls and window reveals, LED lighting that enhances the sense of spaciousness, and larger pivoting overhead storage bins’.

And it’s such an iconic flight deck that this dad built a Boeing 737-800 flight simulator in his garage with a cockpit that’s seriously close to the real thing.