Hacker News Reader

Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

In airplanes touchscreens are less of an issue than in cars. In cars you have to have a hand on the wheel 99% of the time, and your gaze on the road. You can't afford interaction with a complicated non-haptic touch screen menu.

In airplanes it's different. Here, outside of takeoff and landing, it's OK to look at a screen for 10 seconds while interacting with it with a hand.

View on HN

Not to mention that airplaines usually have TWO pilots onboard, so one can use touch screens while the other watches the sky ahead. Cars, on the other hand, have just one person in driver's seat.

> it's OK to look at a screen for 10 seconds

Not really. Pilots are supposed to be visually looking for traffic 90% of the time, and the rest scanning instruments.

So to be heads-down for 10 seconds, the non-flying pilot would have to arrange that with the flying pilot.

Under VFR sure, obviously under IFR they are looking at the instruments as much as 100% of the time, including the instruments which inform them if planes are nearby, and instruments which inform them of their location, direction, and all of the variables therein.

It would be madness if pilots had to rely solely on their eyes to locate other planes nearby. There is thankfully instruments which do this as well.

In VMC you still have a responsibility to see and avoid, regardless of whether you're on an instrument flight plan or not. (Ref: Regulation 14 CFR Part 91.113 (b))

Radar coverage has become ubiquitous in most places, but there's not universal coverage. Heads-up time is very important unless you're flying in actual IMC.

Can't find equivalent rule from ICAO, is this regulation US only?

Refer to ICAO Annex 11 - it's not the exact point being made by the GP, but note that traffic separation for IFR traffic from VFR traffic is only provided in Class A, B and C airspace.

Or, you know just flying the autopilot, which many do like 90% of the flying time...

I think what GP is trying to say is that because your average airlines has around 10+ km of altitude to loose before rapid disassembly commences, which takes a non-trivial amoun of time, compared to a car, which can go on a short and unintentional offroad trip within a few seconds or less.

No, you don't. you can fly over high mountains, having a lot less distance between the plane and the terrain, but how you lose altitude is more important: just a single km drop can be unrecoverable if exceeding VNE and losing a wing in the process.

Most planes in the world are not the big airliners, but smaller planes where single pilot operation is very frequent and many planes do not have a complex autopilot, but usually a 2 or 3 axis stabilization. Also in turbulent weather looking for 10 seconds at a screen can induce motion sickness even to seasoned pilots. We have to do that for map checks and calculations, not a pleasure.

Huh, I wonder if they can use a measurement to adjust the refresh rate based on turbulence. I think they did this for the space shuttle experiencing vibrations to make a screen readable.

It is not the refresh rate, it's the fact that you are looking at a screen that is not moving so much while the airplane and you body is shaking; your internal sensors are telling you are moving, the eyes do not correlate the information, you get motion sickness. I had this problem in my first 50 hours of flying, sometimes even after 100 hours.

Not necessarily. There are many moments during the operation of an aircraft where full attention is paramount. Yes, you see a pilot leaving the cockpit to use the lavatory while the co-pilot is monitoring the autopilot, but the margins are just as small as operating a motor vehicle.

Absolutely not true. In cruise, stabilized, especially with AP - the margins are MUCH MUCH higher. Pilots have fallen asleep (two of them) - overflown airports still landed etc.

I think major difference is commercial airliner vs say fighter jet. As a layman it still seems pretty wrong to make most of the screen highly dynamic. Maybe designated one on the side.

Back to the topic - in car, unless specifically intended for other passengers, driver should never stare on some stupid screen in a place way off the line of sight for driving. Whenever I do that even for a split second in my 15-year old bmw (checking if that knob is really for what I want), there can be an atomic blast in front of me and I wouldn't see it.

Fighter jets are starting to use touchscreens, too.

Because fancy, advanced UIs work so well for Navy ships.

I'm not arguing for touch screens - I don't like them, but to say a commercial pilot in cruise at 30K in controlled airspace with controlled separations and TCAS / ADS-B has margins as low as someone driving 85 MPH with traffic literally 50 feet in front of them is absolutely ridiculous. The spacing distances alone are 100x different (in terms of travel time).

Deaths and injuries per mile traveled supports the idea that flying is MUCH MUCH safer.

I remember when that happened, pretty shocking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_(airline)#2008_incident_an...

My partner is a first officer, and frequently describes his job as being a glorified babysitter outside of takeoff and landing.

Worth noting that a significant amount of the information pilots use in the cockpit (at major US carriers, at least), things like flight plans, are on an iPad.

... until something goes wrong. Then a touch screen is the last thing you want. An airliner moving uncontrollably is no time to try touching just the right spot of the screen, and avoid touching the wrong spot.

Was team screen til this point.

In critical systems, you want to make sure inputs are easy to use in the worst case scenario.

Even the best of touchscreens can't compare to physical controls in tough times.

I can just as easily make the argument the other way around: An airliner moving uncontrollably is no time to try touching just the right knob (of which there are like a hundred), and avoid touching the wrong one.

You'd be wrong. The critical controls are uniquely shaped so that the pilot can put his hands quickly on the correct one and know it's correct.

Part of pilot training (at least in my dad's day in the AF) was blindfolding the pilot and the instructor names a control, and the student must put his hands on it. Or he flunks.

I don't believe this is equivalent though. With hardware controls, most (if not all) of them are immediately accessible at all times. With proper training, body movement and tactile feedback will train your muscle memory which will help you find the right control without much of a hassle.

Kinda like trying to flip just the right toggle switch and avoid flipping the wrong one?

Just because it's on a touchscreen doesn't mean it has to be tiny and hard to touch. A 17" touchscreen could have fewer controls than the same hardware panel. And the controls could be bigger on the touchscreen.

It’s not like trying to flip just the right toggle. You’ve flipped it thousands of times and memorized its exact location through haptic memory. You gently feel the surroundings to ensure your hand is in the right location and then you make the decisive motion with your fingers. You don’t need to look while doing this. This is how hands work. This is how you type. I wish people would stop pretending they don’t understand this.

BS.

Imagine trying to find the right switch on this by feel, without hitting the wrong one by accident.

https://live.staticflickr.com/6150/5990351987_fb9c159ea5_b.j...

Easy mode, given the variety of orientation points in form of switches you can gently touch with fingers to recognize position.

That said, usually you make a short look at the panel to benefit from that hardcoded visual-motion coordination hw in your head.

> flipped it thousands of times

This raises a question: how many times do an average pilot actually flip a switch over their carrier?

Many switches are flipped once or twice on takeoff, then again before or after landing. Depending on the plane (small GA aircraft or airliner or anything inbetween) there could be 4 or 5 switches to flip in total before takeoff, or 30-40. One of the most ubiquitously used controls in aircraft are concentric rotary encoders though, with a button integrated in them if you press the top of the encoder. Those are used to do menu navigation in the GPS units used in many planes, or for altitude/heading selectors in autopilot units.

Worth mentioning that these days GPS units seem to be getting touchscreens but usually still aren't losing the physical buttons.

Thiss os how i typw somtimws.

Just out of curiosity, do pilots still manually take off and land fully, or does auto-pilot / computer do this too nowadays?

The technology exists, but autoland functionality depends on the plane model and the airport. Usually, most of the approach is done with ILS with the final moments being manual.

Modern airliners are just short of autonomous. Even if they aren't, unless you are landing or on initial ascent, you are generally minutes away from catastrophic outcomes regardless of your control inputs. In fact, most of the time, if something bad is happening, simply letting go of the controls will lead to the issue resolving itself.

A car is very often fractions of a second away from a serious accident.

A plane at cruise altitude is rarely less than minutes away (unless, in some planes, you are actively trying to crash the plane/make the wings fall off)

> In fact, most of the time, if something bad is happening, simply letting go of the controls will lead to the issue resolving itself.

Unless you're flying a Boeing 737 MAX that is.

Indian Road Congress specifications recommend 3.5m minimum lane width for multi lane roads, 1.06m minimum center margin. Airplanes complex enough for touchscreen interfaces would be awful tight in those margins ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com