![]() Newer airplanes are being designed with fewer switches and gauges. the mystery is gone and it's just a laptop computer.Īnd so it goes with airplanes. This goes on, and before long you can even pick up a different brand of laptop, with different buttons and pretty much figure it out on your own. We can do that? Of course, that's what this port is for. You complain to your friend that the monitor (hey, we've learned a fancy new word!) is a little too small, and they suggest that you hook up an external monitor. Suddenly it doesn't seem quite so complicated anymore. You have the arrow keys, the function keys, the key modifiers, the CD controls. This takes much of the mystery out of the complicated mess on the top, but then as you start to learn more you figure out that some of the less commonly keys are grouped together by function. Then someone points out that most of the buttons on the top are buttons that you can press to make a letter show up on the screen. It has things that pop open from the side. thing (remember, you've never seen one before!) has 94 buttons on the top alone! It has all kinds of little jacks and plugs on the outside. To put it in perspective, let's say that you had never seen a laptop computer before: As you learn about the airplane (especially modern ones) you will see that these individual controls are grouped together by system, in a way that actually makes pretty good sense. They are quite simple actually, but what makes it appear complicated to you is that there are so many of them. In the vast majority of cases, the various controls in the aircraft do one thing: Turn something on, or turn it off. I would argue that the controls of an aircraft are not complicated, but rather that they are simply foreign to you. What's the design philosophy behind the design of the cockpit controls? Or maybe most cockpit designers like to make the operation of aircraft a pain in the behind for everybody else. Maybe it fosters speed and security in an emergency situation by having everything accessible right away, accessible through muscle memory on the part of the pilot. Maybe it forces the pilot to really understand every single nuance of the plane and its operation before even being able to taxiing. Maybe it makes it harder for an amateur to just wing it (no pun intended) and make it looks like (s)he knows what (s)he's doing. ![]() Anyhow, I can see a lot of possible reasons why one actually would want cockpits to be designed in this way. Every time when seeing this, from my point of view, chaos of control surfaces and indicators, I'm always thinking to myself "This HAS to be possible to make easier!" For a layman like myself, the cockpit of every single modern airplane that I've laid my eyes on seems like a complex, intimidating mess with knobs, buttons, screens and levers literally covering every single square centimeter.
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