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Comment by RachelF | Hacker News Reader

Yeah - the article is well written, but junk and full of hyperbole like:

"He saw, instead, the impossibility of flying these planes at all." Really! B-17's completed hundreds of thousands of missions.

And pilots still land modern planes "wheels up", so modern UI design has not eliminated the problem.

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To be fair, the few times I've sat in the cockpit of a plane I've said to myself "good lord, one person has to keep on top of all these dials and controls" - six dials in a glider that doesn't even have an engine? Fifteen in a small plane for non-professional pilots? To say nothing of the cockpits of commercial airliners and fighter jets.

And presumably every one of those dials corresponds to something important the pilot has to be monitoring and controlling.

There aren't many vehicles with an interface that complex.

I think you're looking at it the wrong way, the actual flight controls are pretty rudimentary and simple to understand. The dials represent information and tools available to the pilot should they need them. They're all pretty simple taken in isolation, and they usually have configurable warning states, so you don't need to watch them like a hawk.

Also, you can halve the count in most cockpits, as they'll be redundancy duplicates or co-pilot duplicates. Cognitive load during flight is pretty low, too, so plenty of time to keep an eye on things. Landings and take offs are prepared for with plenty of time ahead (at least they should be) so again, plenty of time to check and configure.

Over time, you get used to where all the gauge needles should be and it becomes easy to notice if something is out of place. The AAA gauges, Attitude, Altitude, Airspeed are the most important, and also the ones that change a lot. Something like EGT or the voltmeter is just for diagnosing error conditions. A warning light will turn on if one of these values gets out of wack.

Numeric displays require a lot more conscious effort to read a number, decode it , decide if it is an acceptable value. This is why the steam gauge style remains popular, even if it is a digital render now.

Agreed. He also got the "bicycle for the mind" quote wrong -- kind of hard to do when Steve Jobs' explanation is a youtube search away: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTRzYjoZhIY

yeah, it sounds more like "people on the floor knew what the problem was, but management needed somebody from outside to tell them what the issue is".

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