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The flight deck
A cockpit or flight deck is the area, on the front part of an aircraft, spacecraft, or submersible, from which a pilot controls the vehicle.
The cockpit of an aircraft contains flight instruments on an instrument panel, and the controls that enable the pilot to fly the aircraft.
Fighter jets cockpits
Why are there so many buttons and switches in a fighter jet?
Adam Daymude, former US Navy EA-6B Prowler pilot, explains on Quora;
‘Today’s aircraft have been designed with the parsimony learned through decades of experience. In the old days, and in older jets, you would be right that there are a lot of unnecessary switches and buttons. Allow me to explain the evolution please.
‘Here’s a picture of the aft cockpit of an EA-6B Prowler, designed in the 1960’s:
‘There are a ton of circuit breakers up top plus a ton of switches that do various things. The forward cockpit is just as cluttered plus another circuit breaker panel behind us in the middle with dozens of buttons.
‘That’s what a current, F-35, cockpit looks like. Little bit different, isn’t it? Not so many switches and buttons anymore.
‘What happened was early jets were designed by engineers with an engineer’s mentality. They wanted maximum control of the aircraft at the aircrew’s fingertips. Engineers are obsessed with minutiae and granularity, as well they should be. They spend years running through every scenario they think can happen and come up with a solution to mitigate problems these issues may cause; they build in redundant systems; they do some electrical wizardry (everything electrical is wizardry to me) to isolate systems if they break down; they game plan every scenario they can think of. And some of those game plans couldn’t be automated so they needed to enlist the aircrew’s help. Engineers gave aircrew switches and buttons to do what their testing said was required to fix issues while in flight.
Clean Battle Penguin cockpit
‘Several things happened simultaneously to arrive at the new, clean Battle Penguin (BP) cockpit. What it all boils down to, though, was aircrew grumbling at first and then shouting from the rooftops that we need to fix these cockpits! Here’s a scenario:
‘A 4 aircrew Prowler gets a caution in the cockpit that the RADAR is overheating. A caution is a yellow light that says “this isn’t good, and if you don’t take care of me, I could turn red…into a warning that the jet is about to die on you.” Ok! Time to bust out our NATOPS knowledge and handbook we take with us on flights. Step 1: turn off power to the RADAR. “Check.” Step 2: pull circuit breaker for bus control A/1. “Uh…hold on. Hey, do any of you guys remember which panel that’s on? Is it on yours or ours?” I’m exaggerating slightly because for emergency procedures for cautions and warnings, we memorize and study where those buttons are.
‘But say it’s a lowly error message (that’s the lowest ranked message we get in the cockpit from the airplane itself). Say it says your blinker fluid is low. Well now, that almost never happens! We bust out our handbook again, but this time, this is only something we’ve read and studied about a couple of times. We didn’t memorize this part…too many other competing interests. This time when it tells you to pull a circuit breaker, you have to bust out the CB panel diagram to try and find it (also in your handbook). You have time because an error isn’t going to kill you but it still distracts aircrew for a long time while they should be doing other things.
Shifting fighter jets cockpit design philosophy
‘So, our design philosophy shifted and started asking the end users, aircrew, what they wanted and needed. Oh, and along the way, computers became massively more powerful. Engineers still wanted to deal with those pesky errors but with better computers, they were able to automate more and take the aircrews out of the loop. Which was fine by us! We had told them that we don’t need or want such granular control in the cockpit; it is WAY too much for us to know and understand.
‘There’s a huge however here though! Did you notice in the BP cockpit that the screens all have buttons around the sides? Those screens are all multifunctional, meaning you can switch what each screen is showing you. We usually have a standard config of maps, weapons, and RADAR that we set our screens up to so that we always know where to look when time is precious. But those screens can also be used to dive into the minutiae of the aircraft. We may not have CB panels like in the past, but the engineers still gave us maximum control possible of the aircraft. It’s just buried in software now so that it’s out of sight unless you really need it.’
Daymude concludes;
‘Again, it was a parsimonious evolution of the cockpit learned through decades of experience.’
Photo credit: U.S. Navy
