What to do about the "window shades" question?

Question

There has been a question about window shades, which has been asked on both Travel.SE and Skeptics.SE.

Why open up the window-shades before landing?

On commercial airlines, I've noticed that the flight attendants always ask everyone to open up their window shades before landing or take-off.

I've always wondered why this is. Is it something to do with the mechanics of the plane? Is it some kind of passenger-comfort thing?

I can't imagine what difference this act makes, but the attendants seemed really insistent on it. :)

Now there is a question about cross site duplicates on Meta Stack Overflow, but it's a question that (kind of at least) fits on all 3 sites, being being relatively narrow, meaning that it's unlikely that there's going to be much more added to the topic. In this specific instance, what should we do with the question?

Answer 1

You're right in that they are duplicate questions, but the answers won't be duplicate because each site is focused on different things and will have answers from a different perspective.

• Travel.SE will have answers more from a passenger perspective.
• Skeptics.SE will have answers more from a "does this really make a difference" perspective.
• Aviation.SE will (hopefully) have answers more from the pilot/safety/regulatory perspective.

Skeptics.SE is kind of a special case because almost all of their content is going to be applicable to some other site as well.

As the Meta Stack Overflow post that you linked to mentions, let it remain and be useful to the people on all of the sites! Don't run people off from here (or even make them go to another site) if the question is appropriate for our audience and is on-topic.