
Radars versus Dashboards: A Life/Death Choice - bhousel
http://blog.trailmeme.com/2011/01/radars-versus-dashboards-a-lifedeath-choice/
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lucasjung
This was painful for me to read, because the author clearly doesn't understand
the roles played by different types of avionics in building situational
awareness (SA), and the whole analogy he tried to build on top of this
misunderstanding was therefore deeply flawed. I think he may be on to
something with his dichotomy between "conflation" and "discrimination," but it
doesn't really apply to the example case he used to introduce it (avionics),
which makes the whole thing give me a headache every time I try to think about
it. I wish he had just left out the whole cockpit analogy and this post
probably would have been much better.

The fact is that U.S., former-soviet (FSU), and other cockpit designs all
include elements that are "dashboards" (instruments, really) and "radars,"
(sensors, more broadly). The difference betweent he "wall of dials" and the
glass cockpit is simply a difference in how this combination of elements is
displayed. The glass cockpit, if executed properly, can be far better than
even the best steam-gauge cockpit, and either style can be executed so poorly
as to become a net drain on SA. The Indian pilot in the story preferred the
steam gauges for one reason more than any other: _it is what he was used to_.
It may also be the case that the only glass cockpit he was ever exposed to
happened to be an especially bad design.

Glass cockpits are actually _better_ for "management by exception:" you don't
have to ignore irrelevant or unimportant information because it _simply is not
displayed_. All of the same gauges exist virtually, with a computer monitoring
them constantly in the background. The things you need to see all of the time
are shown all of the time, except with more real estate dedicated to them. The
things you don't need to see most of the time only pop up when they leave the
range of numbers which would have been green on an old-fashioned dial. Not
only does this free up more space for the stuff you need to look at
frequently, it also is more likely to catch your attention when you _do_ need
to look at it.

