Not long ago when I saw a picture of a cockpit in a 747 for example it seemed every inch had some kind of control or gauge on it. Looks to be 100 or more . How does the pilot look at all of these? I assume they have some kind of warning if the reading is too high or low.
With modern planes it appears that most of this info is now put on LCD screens so that might be easier to deal with.
One thing I learned that makes it easier to spot a problem, is that the dials are all calibrated so that the ‘normal’ reading looks the same - usually at around two o’clock. Remember that having four engines quadruples the number of engine readout gauges and that there are always two people there to keep an eye on them.
here is a picture of an old style cockpit
Note that for this style of cockpit, there is a third person there, the flight engineer. See all the buttons and switches and gauges on the right side? The flight engineer sits in front of that panel, behind the two pilots.
Not everything needs to be scanned or monitored at all times.
The small jets I fly are mostly “glass” cockpit. We have four large monitors that display most of the information we need, and they can be configured in various ways. But when I was an airline pilot I flew a plane with mostly “steam gauges”, the round dials most people think of when they visualize an airline cockpit. Everyone who looked at a photo of it asked similar questions to the OP’s.
First, there are a number of “standby” or backup instruments. They are checked periodically, but not really utilized unless the main instrument fails.
Engine instruments are mostly grouped together, and as the OP surmises, they should look more or less the same during normal operations. The fact that you’ll have oil pressure, oil temp, fuel quantity, fuel pressure, etc for each engine means they are duplicated, triplicated so there are lots of instruments in once place, but they’re fairly easy to scan. And while we’re keeping an eye on them, you don’t need to stare at them constantly.
Then there are lots of actions we’d take only under certain conditions. In my jet there are switches to enter “reversionary mode” on the monitors if one malfunctions. That’s another group you pretty much never reference unless needed. We have lots of switches and monitoring equipment for de-icing - on many flights we’ll never touch them.
So long story short, any cockpit looks complex, but it makes sense in context. And we’re very well trained.
This thread made me remember an incident that happened during the launch of Apollo 12. The rocket was struck by lightning, twice, just after launch. It caused some of their equipment to go offline and the ground team radioed up to the crew that they wanted them to throw a very obscure switch to fix the problem.
Two of the three astronauts had no idea what or where that switch was, but Alan Bean - on his first spaceflight - did. It was dramatized in the excellent mini-series From the Earth the Moon. Here’s a clip of the scene.
Decades ago I saw a cartoon. An airline pilot and a non-pilot are in the cockpit, which is crammed with gauges and switches. The pilot says, ‘Oh, most of them are just for show. But don’t tell anyone, or everyone will want to be a pilot!’
I didn’t know Dave Foley was in that.
My favorite…
BuZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Passenger: what the hell was that?
Pilot: Oh, it’s the game clock. My move, Rook to R3
LLama hit the punchline. What you need to actively watch is a small fraction of everything.
Your pic of a 747-100/200/300 was about the worst example of visual overload in the history of aviation. Even then it’s not as bad as all that.
You can divide the stuff in any cockpit into several categories:[ol]
[li]Stuff only used by maintenance staff.[/li][li]Stuff only used in emergencies or in response to malfunctions.[/li][li]Stuff only used to get the airplane started or shut down.[/li][li]Stuff used to operate the machinery, not control the airplane’s path.[/li][li]Stuff used to communicate and navigate.[/li][li]Stuff used to assess and control the airplane’s path.[/ol]Only the last category needs to be monitored in real time.[/li]
If you’ll open a browser to your pic we’ll dissect the panel sections.
All the stuff along the right wall in the foreground is the Fight Engineer’s panel. He/She uses that stuff for 2, 3, and 4. Rarely they’ll need to use the Type 2 switches & idiot lights. They use the much more numerous type 3s once at each end of a flight then forget about 'em, and they have a bunch of guages, knobs, and switches that get used regularly as the flight goes along. Such as watching the temperature in various sections of the cabin and tweaking the several thermostats up or down a smidgen. It’s 98% don’t-touch or set-and-forget. 2% gets used regularly while we’re in motion.
Along the ceiling above the windshields you’ll see 3 panel sections. The one furthest forward has a bunch of toggle switches sticking out. Then aft of that are two similar looking panels that look like an undifferentiated regular array of little white lights and pushbuttons.
Those latter two, and the small diagonal panel at upper left foreground, are circuit breakers. Hundreds of them. Almost all of which the crew *never * looks at or touches. A few, maybe 10, might be referenced in an emergency procedure. The lights you see are the backlighting that’s designed to not be visible from where we sit. But really adds to the Christmas tree dazzle effect when viewed from aft. Normally all those lights are off and that’s just a big wall-o-darkness that nobody needs to pay any attention to. Those are 98% Type 1 with a couple percent of Type 2.
The forwardmost panel on the overhead is where the pilots control their part of the machinery. So same idea as the flight engineer’s panel but more about interacting with the outside world and less about the innards of the machine as a machine. So we rarely use the Type 2 switches & idiot lights, we use the type 3s once per flight then forget about 'em, and we have a couple of Type 4 switches that get used regularly as the situation dictates. Such as exterior lights that are switched off or on depending on day vs. night or clouds vs. clear or low vs. high altitude. Again it’s 98% don’t-touch or set-and-forget. 2% gets used regularly while we’re in motion.
So that leaves just the stuff below the windshield that’s ahead of and alongside the pilots. That’s where the flying happens.
Each pilot has an array of 8 large gauges in front of them. In the pic they’re partly obscured by the yoke. That is what we use to assess the airplane’s path. That’s the Type 6 stuff that really matters all the time. The pilot actually flying the airplane is looking at that, and pretty much only that, pretty much continuously except for short glances elsewhere. The other pilot is also watching their copy of the same gauges looking for any surprises when they’re not temporarily busy doing something else.
The airplane is steered by the yoke in one hand and the 4 throttles in the center grasped as a group in the other hand. That’s the rest of Type 6. From start of takeoff through end of landing the pilot flying could have ahold of just those two things and never let go except to scratch his nose. The other pilot handles the rest. 8 gauges, two levers and that’s it; you’re the pilot. Everything else is ancillary details. Everything.
The stuff on the lower console between the pilots is mostly Type 5: comm and nav. There’s the part you can see aft of the throttles, plus a smaller section just forward of them that’s hard to see in the pic. That section of cockpit is the other pilot’s main concern. Even so, other than talking on the radio which happens every minute or 5 or 10, that panel’s not touched but every 20 minutes in cruise. A lot of it is set and mostly forget.
What’s left are the engine gauges at front center. As others have said, there’s 4 columns for 4 engines. One gauge in each column, usually the topmost one, is the one referenced when setting power. The others matter when starting engines, or a malfunction happens, or as a general cross check of engine health. And since you operate all 4 engines as a unit, practically speaking a pilot will be looking just at either the upper right one or upper left one while adjusting power. After that a periodic glance over there that all the rest more or less agree with their mates on either side and nobody is pointing crazy and that’s about it.
Folks have mentioned the idea that “normal all points to 3 o’clock” or whatever. That idea was tried in the 1960s and pretty well abandoned shortly thereafter. It was actually more confusing than a zero reading is straight up 12 o’clock, a maximum reading is all the way around clockwise to 11 o’clock, and “normal” is wherever it happens to fall. Commonly with red lines to mark minimums and maximums, and perhaps yellow caution arcs inside the redlines to indicate impending trouble or temporary use only settings.
In modern airplanes several things have happened to vastly reduce the clutter without really changing the big picture about the 6 categories.
One of the major innovations was something called “dark cockpit”. In an old airplane there would be dozens of idiot lights that were on all the time to indicate that things were working normally. That’s not done now. The only time stuff lights up is when it’s misbehaving.
Instead of festooning the panels with hundreds of idiot lights, the computer spits a message onto the forward center screen. They’re prioritized, and even if it takes 5 pages to show them all, it doesn’t take up much real estate.
Screens have let us coalesce lots of information displays onto one screen. The 747 flight engineers panel has a section with hydraulic pressure and quantity gauges, 4 of each. The electrical section has electrical voltage, current, and frequency gauges. 4 of each for the AC power. Plus 2 or 3 more voltage and current gauges for the DC power. The fuel section has 8 quantity gauges, one for each tank. Plus 4 total consumption gauges, one for each engine. The air conditioning system has … etc.
On a fully modern airplane the systems screen has pages for each system. And on each page the info is mostly digits with color codes for normal, marginal, and abnormal. The result is umpteen square feet of visual clutter is collapsed to a small focused space. That’s left completely dark until the computer notices something is awry and pops the relevant info onto the screen for crew attention.
The FE’s job on old airplanes is to be the thing that observes all this stuff and detects any out of parameter operations, then reacts using whatever controls are necessary. Now the computer is watching all those parameters all the time. There’s no need to display all of it all the time. That greatly simplifies what’s shown to the crew.
More and more of the *responses *to type 2, 3, and 4 stuff is also becoming fully auto. On an older airplane if there was an electrical malfunction the engineer was busy playing quite a tune on his switches rerouting power, eliminating excess loads, providing alternate supplies, etc. On a modern airplane a box in the basement does all that. And posts a message on the screen either telling you what it did or whining if it couldn’t.
On an old airplane starting an engine was a symphony of actions by the FE to prep the electricity, hydraulics, and air for start, the two pilots to operate the start, and all three to monitor for malfunctions. Following start the FE had another mound of fiddling to bring that engine’s accessories online and configure to start anther engine or taxi. On the real modern airplanes one pilot pushes one button and HAL does all that stuff. Including responding quickly and correctly to potentially damaging malfunctions. When HAL’s done he reconfigures everything for taxi or pops a message on the screen if he found an issue.
Old style is very conceptually simple internally, if very intricate on the surface exposed to the crew. Because we were the only brains in the outfit. Modern style is deeply complex internally and very simple at the UI surface. HAL deals with the vast array of details so we don’t have to.
Coupling this simplicity with machinery that’s 50 or 100x more reliable than 1960s stuff was has really taken the excitement out of the job.
I’ve always felt that the Concorde achieved levels of complexity that other planes can only dream about.
I’m always impressed how LSLGuy can do #6 and still get paid by the word for GQ posts.
I got to sit in the pilot’s seat of a Concorde once, on the ground. It struck me as not really atypical of a cockpit of that vintage. A bit busy, but without the ram’s horn yoke and at a glance, it could be mistaken for a 707 or early 747. On closer inspection it had a number of controls not seen on other transport aircraft such as afterburners, the nose cone position selector and radiation detectors.
Incidentally, the plane I’m transitioning into now has a ram’s horn yoke just like the Concorde. I’ve always wanted to fly with one!
The most complex cockpit I’ve ever seen was a Harrier jet. I’ve sat in one of those too, and the owner pointed out the numerous tiny gauges - they could be obscured with a quarter and were all over the place. With only one engine, every damn one of them was really important.
Easy. Just don’t go to work very often. One of the advantages of seniority is vacations around holidays.
As to Concorde, agree with Llama. If there’s a difference, it’s of degree, not of kind.
The Concorde cockpit is quite narrow compared to a Boeing or Airbus; especially up by the pilots. It’s more like a slightly plumped RJ or a bizjet. As such the forward panel is crowded. It doesn’t have much more stuff, it just has zero empty square inches. In that it resembles a fighter cockpit.
Looking at Robot Arm’s link we see that for lack of space and maybe other reasons they didn’t fill the ceiling with circuit breakers. We see a bunch on the left sidewall behind the Captain’s seat. Probably the rest are on the aft wall of the cockpit.
Because the Concorde cockpit is so narrow, the engineer’s rump will be parked left of the aircraft centerline.
I do think the Concorde engineer’s panel has a few more categories of things than the 747. Here’s some better pics of the Concorde engineer panel specifically. Note also where the FE seat is in the first pic; slid all the way across the cockpit to the left sidewall.
The 747, C-5, and C-141 all had pretty busy engineer panels too. The C-141 used a few vertical tape gauges that can squeeze 4 channels of readings into the space of about 1-1/2 round dial gauges.
You can really see the difference in cockpit spaciousness between my first Concorde link that looks crowded with no people, and this last 747 link that looks spacious with 3 beefy guys in it. It’s not so much that Concorde has lots more stuff than a say, 747, but when they put 5% more stuff in 40% less space the result is it seems like a lot more stuff.
Congrats. Airplane changes are always work, but it feels pretty neat when you get out the other side. Going to the Phenom? If so, that’s a pretty sexy place to work. My stuff looks pretty rag-tag by comparison. And that’s after the midlife update to more modern screens & nav gear.
Yeah, but that vintage seemed to be the high water mark of busy cockpits, at least for airliners.
The size is part of it, as LSLGuy mentioned. There are nose and afterburner controls. I’ve also read that the Concorde had to deal with changes in lift during supersonic flight so the flight engineer had to manage pumping fuel to different tanks to adjust the center-of-gravity.
I didn’t say it was a quantum leap more complicated that other planes; but a few little things can make a difference.
Sending you a PM.
Too bad you missed this flight.
Bumping this thread because of something interesting about the plane I’m training on now:
The systems class instructor pointed out that there is a physical button in our cockpit that we will never use. Not rarely, not only when directed by the checklist - actually never touch it. It’s a component of the electrical system that was fully automated in later versions of the aircraft. But for reasons pertaining to aircraft certification, it still has to be there.
So that’s at least one cockpit control which is completely ornamental!
As long as the pilot seat does not suffer that fate, I think you have continued employment covered. 
