Cockpit Design

2 Pages 422 Words

Stanley N. Roscoe wrote “Ergavionics: Designing the Job of Flying an Airplane,” which is a study of the ergonomic principles that govern the design and operation of an airplane cockpit. Ergavionic principles deal with control location and operation, display integration and pictorial realism, and control/display direction-of-motion relationships (Roscoe, 2002). The goal of Ergavionics is to decrease the role human error plays in aircraft crashes; human error is the leading cause of all aircraft accidents.
Fuel mismanagement is a large factor in human error, aircraft crashes. Beech aircraft are problematic because there are two tanks in the aircraft, so the fuel indicator always reads full, if the fuel tanks are not switched then the aircraft engine can be starved of fuel. “The National Transportation Safety Board has found “fuel mismanagement” to be the probable cause of a highly disproportionate number of CFIT accidents involving fuel starvation in Beech airplanes” (Roscoe, 2002). In fact, this university experienced an accident of this sort in the spring of 2004, when an aviation student crashed landed as a result of fuel starvation. Roscoe believes there should be a new, safer, design. This design finally came after litigation became so costly that management finally decided to introduce a safer design in their new planes (Roscoe, 2002).
There is a controversy regarded whether or not the “little plane” or the artificial horizon should move on an attitude indicator. In response to the controversy, regarding the attitude indicator, Roscoe proposes a solution. A flight path predictor can be added to the conventional moving horizontal display by allowing the airplane symbol to move in immediate response to control inputs and in the same, expected direction. When tested the flight path predictor resulted in immediate improvement in landing approaches (Roscoe, 2002).
Other improvements, which technology is currently ...