That said, I'd love to see some serious research on this topic.
If you have payed attention to the controls in a cockpit, you will see that all the switches, knobs, and levers have different sizes, shapes, texture, and tilt. That is not accidental. It helps with muscle memory and when you have to alter many many different parameters in a short span of time, knowing where to look for and getting "instant" and tactile feedback is important, that is hardly possible with touchscreen interfaces as I know them.
The flap controls have little airfoils on the top.
The cockpit is full of things like that, all learned the hard way. People are very bad at inventing intuitive interfaces.
For example, aviation has standard phrases for things. Like "takeoff power" is maximum power, as that's what you use for takeoff. One day, a pilot was landing and suddenly had to abort. He yelled "takeoff power" to the copilot, who heard "take off power", and chopped power to the engines at the worst possible moment, and they crashed.
The phrase was changed to "full power".
How could a generation of pilots and aviation experts never notice the ambiguity inherent in "takeoff power"? But they didn't, until there was an accident.
>As a consequence of the accident, sweeping changes were made to international airline regulations and to aircraft. Aviation authorities around the world introduced requirements for standard phrases and a greater emphasis on English as a common working language.[13]
>Air traffic instruction should not be acknowledged solely with a colloquial phrase such as "OK" or even "Roger" (which simply means the last transmission was received[58]), but with a readback of the key parts of the instruction, to show mutual understanding. The phrase "take off" is now spoken only when the actual takeoff clearance is given or when cancelling that same clearance (i.e. "cleared for take-off" or "cancel take-off clearance"). Up until that point, aircrew and controllers should use the phrase "departure" in its place, e.g. "ready for departure". Additionally, an ATC clearance given to an aircraft already lined-up on the runway must be prefixed with the instruction "hold position".[59]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster
https://web.archive.org/web/20170218144312/http://lessonslea...
1. I'm a guitarist.
It's super annoying when a string breaks, even if I'm not using it. My fingers can feel even the adjacency of the string (vibrations, I'm guessing), and I lose all sense of orientation on the freatboard if one of the strings is gone, even if I'm not touching that string.
2. While I'm not a pilot, I spent years testing avionics.
Years later, I can still blindly, through muscle memory, replay sequences of commands in my mind, as actuated by mechanical buttons (LSKs) on either side of the display, and rotary encoders to "dial in" new values (e.g. frequencies).
I would usually run through the settings just with my hands, barely looking, and only double-check the settings as the last step, before actually committing to whatever action I was preparing.
I can't imagine doing something similar on a touchscreen without constantly havng to look.