

Space Shuttle Flight Deck - karolisd
http://360vr.com/2011/06/22-discovery-flight-deck-opf_6236/index.html

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techiferous
I'm a big fan of minimal interfaces. But I guess minimal interfaces are good
for the web user who is looking at your web app for two seconds before
deciding whether to keep looking or move on.

This actually looks like a pretty effective interface for users who are
willing to be trained for months. Think about it: after you are trained, every
piece of information is just one glance away and every action is just one
button click away.

I'd love to hear an opinion from an expert, though. _sinks back into his
armchair_

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cynest
I found a picture of an A380 cockpit and it appears to have that design
philosophy.
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Airbus_A3...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Airbus_A380_cockpit.jpg)

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ugh
As you can see there are a lot of big screens and very few actual buttons and
switches in that photo. It looks like the four keyboards are the bulk of the
buttons. I would be curious to know how modal those screens are and how much
information they can display at one point in time. It doesn’t look like they
can display much and I can’t imagine that it’s fun to go hunting for necessary
information in an emergency. Depending on how that works it might be a
usability nightmare, one can only hope that Airbus does plenty of UI testing.

(In that context an interesting question is what this interface is optimized
for. It may work great on normal flights – that’s nearly all of them, by the
way – but break down horribly in emergencies. I guess the UI design rule of
designing for the common and not the rare case doesn’t really apply here.)

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hugh3
Actually I was reading an article (I can't find it now) about that Qantas A380
engine explosion, and it said that this was a genuine problem in that
situation. Once the engine blew up, there were dozens and dozens of different
errors popping up, and the first thing the pilots had to do was to page
through all the error codes and prioritize them to figure out what the _real_
problems were.

In many ways, better to have a single giant control panel which lights up a
different light for each error that can occur.

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spitfire
This is actually an artifact of the way planes are certified today (DO-178B).
The verification process has to be done by hand - you can't verify
automatically generated computer code.

The result is that you can't build say, a prolog program which produces a huge
switch statement to prioritize errors. As a result, there effectively is no
prioritization of errors and warnings at all. They're all treated as the same
severity.

The new standard, DO-178C allows for computer models to be used in
verification. So we may start seeing automated prioritization and management
in the generation of planes after the A380/787.

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barik
I chuckled when rotating the image and seeing the Dell laptop in the back.

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lamby
This actually reminded me of Stargate SG-1 - everywhere they went they popped
open a chunky Dell machine and started typing.

(It's an interesting thought that it would have cost about $50,000 to get that
laptop into space, weight-wise.)

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mdda
Not if they went through the gate...

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ben1040
The biggest "user interface" feature I noticed wasn't the buttons -- it's that
there's velcro, and lots of it, _everywhere._ Well done.

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j-g-faustus
Interesting, thanks for the link.

I guess this is similar to what non-programmers see when looking at source
code: An impenetrable mess of gobbledygook where it would require months or
years of dedicated effort to figure out what the different commands actually
do.

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cl8ton
Well so much for heads up displays.

That was a cool shot of the shuttle I've never seen before. I wonder how many
of those controls are redundant systems you only need to touch if they light
up?

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antimora
Well, user interface is full of short-cuts, which makes sense considering
pilot would not have time to flip through pages to execute a command.

The seats look awfully uncomfortable, though.

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ltamake
Not really all that different from an jet airplane cockpit. I'm an aviation
enthusiast, btw.

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fnazeeri
Weird how they assume the pilot is left handed...

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VBprogrammer
Actually that is not the assumption at all. The assumption in both the space
shuttle and most other (fixed-wing) aircraft is that the pilot is right
handed. However, what you don't expect is that actually most of the really
fiddly work happens with the right hand, changing settings, pressing buttons,
tuning radio's and writing down notes. The left hand has to be taught to fly
but thats actually less demanding that teaching the left hand to do that other
stuff. This is even true of aircraft which have yokes rather than side-sticks,
as the throttles are controlled by the right hand and during the take-off and
landing the right hand is stationed on the throttles.

Interestingly for a helicopter this pattern is reversed, the control inputs
required to control a helicopter are so much more demanding that the pilot
sits on the right hand side so that he uses his right hand for the primary
control and has to either make do with his left or temporarily switch hands to
do the other stuff described above.

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beagledude
This might be the coolest thing I see all year

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bestes
Flash required

