I have only ever flown fixed wing aircraft. They are generally flown from the left hand seat.
I have noticed that helicopters are generally flown from the right hand seat.
Does anyone know the historical reason for this?
On older helicopters the collective levers (that control blade pitch on the main rotor) were shared between the seats and located physically in the center of the aircraft. Most pilots prefer that the cyclic, which tends to need more complex and frequent adjustments, can be used with their right hand, so having the collective in your left hand and cyclic in your right hand meant the pilot would generally sit on the right.
Most of the cockpit controls for things like engine controls and navigation are also in the center, so it’s generally better if the pilot can keep their right hand on the cyclic while operating these.
Newer helicopters often have a setup where there are independent collectives on the left side of both seats, but the tradition remains as there’s really no reason to change it and no reason piloting a helicopter has to match driving a car.
Fantastic!
Thank you for answering a question which has bothered me for many years!
The design of fixed-wing single place cockpits is similar in that the right hand does the rather dynamic steering with the yoke or stick, while the left hand controls the much more static throttle(s) & handles 90% of the periodic switch-flipping & knob twisting.
There’s a lot of assumption of right-handedness built into machinery of all sorts.
Ha, in the civilized world we drive on the left, and drivers sit on the right.
Every flight where I have been in (and allowed to see the controls) , the lead pilot sits on the right, including helicopters, small commercial (Cessna, mostly) - with the exception of single pilot aircraft (a microlight and a glider, both times I was in the back seat)
The right side driving/right side gears made my driving in Portugal (a right side country) kind of stressful. It was a rental, so - instead of the common trope - I drove it like it belonged to my mother.
That’s a very narrow view of civilized world
I was joking somewhat.
I grew up and learned to drive in Zimbabwe, following the legacy British colonial style, but only got my license in South Africa, which also inherited the British system.
All countries in which I have driven in follow the “left lane” system in the various Southern African countries, except Portugal.
I guess driving in India and Indonesia are the exception, because they are nominally “left lane” but traffic can get beyond insane, especially in big cities, so the right hand lane is always optional.
(apologies to aircraft enthusiasts, for a very off topic post)
Speaking of staying in one’s lane 
Which is why the Airbus side stick has always bugged me. Pilot seat has side stick on the left, co-pilot has the side stick on the right. Clearly Airbus didn’t think handedness mattered.
I guess once the plane is big enough, and with enough fly-by-wire computation in the way, this matters less, but I never really understood why they did this.
I was surprised to learn from the Air France crash that the Airbus controls do not provide feedback to tell the pilot and copilot whether they are fighting over control position. Have they corrected this? Or is that still OK?
I assume the helicopter cyclic position in the center is intended so that (with appropriate quasi-ambidextrousness (ambidextrosity?) the helicopter can be flown from either seat, like a small plane? Do those larger helicopters like the Chinook mandate a copilot, or is that just common sense? How big does an aircraft get before it needs two qualified pilots?
There are generally two cyclics and two collectives, with the cyclics in front of each seat and the collectives to the left of each seat. (Sometimes the left-side controls can be removed.) So yes, a helicopter may be flown by either seat. But it’s easier to reach the panel from the right seat.
Pretty much all two-pilot aircraft, whether small Cessnas, bizjets, Boeings, bombers, or Airbusses have the shared throttle(s) and other engine control knobs in the middle, and a yoke or stick for each pilot flown using their outboard hand. The typical crew arrangement is lead pilot on the left, so that person steers with their left hand. The secondary pilot sits on the right and steers with their right hand.
A very few military big airplanes have two sets of throttles, one for each pilot. In that case each side is set up like a single-pilot aircraft: yoke or stick in the center of that pilot’s space, and throttles off to the left by one’s elbow. They have not yet built a FBW military heavy with side sticks, but if /when they do I’d not be surprised to see a side stick at the right and throttles at the left of each pilot station.
In common airline or military practice for each flight one pilot is the designated pilot steering and the other is the designated pilot watching & helping with everything other than steering. The Captain is always on the left, the Co-pilot is always on the right, and which side is steering depends on whose turn it is to steer.
In bizjets they still have a designated Captain and co-pilot. But it’s common that whoever is the pilot steering sits on the left and whoever is assisting sits on the right. So the airplane is always steered from the left side.
I’ve always had an interest in cockpit ergonomics and its development over time. We’re generally pretty good at it now, though I agree the Airbus sidesticks strike me as poorly conceived.
For me as a pilot, handedness doesn’t matter much - it’s more about the sight picture. I came up as a flight instructor, which means I got comfortable flying from the right seat early on. The first week or so was a big adjustment because it felt like I was a mile away from the instrument panel. But I became so accustomed to it I began flying from the right seat even when solo. When I did have to change seats switching hands was never a problem, but I did have to mentally re-frame where the runway centerline was.
Then I got into aerobatics and began flying planes with tandem seating, meaning one behind the other. That puts you dead in the center and there’s no inferring where the runway centerline is from a side seat. I liked that and I also liked having the stick in my right hand and throttle in the left. But I also flew some planes where it was the opposite (like the Diamond Katana) and could do it fine.
I’ve only flown helicopters a few times, but there I can see having the controls standardized is important. I wouldn’t want the collective in my other hand. Seems similar to driving a stickshift car - when I visited the UK I drove them from the right-hand seat, but thankfully the pedals were the same configuration. Otherwise it probably would have given me trouble.
It has not been “corrected”. It’s still OK enough that there are no plans to retrofit sticks with cross-side feedback.
Whether it’s actually a problem worth fixing or that one Air France crew just lost their shit is a genuine topic of debate.
Sticks that do have cross-pilot feedback have been developed and some of the latest bizjets have them. If / when Boeing ever builds a stick-controlled airplane they’ll probably have them.
Airbus is maybe a bit stuck on this point in that a BIG idea for them is to make every one of their airplanes have the same pilot UI.
Which is a great idea in and of itself, BUT …
The design they started with, the A320, is now 40(!) years old and is definitely showing signs of having been a v1.0 stab at a FBW envelope-protected easy-to-fly computerized airplane. It was definitely a good example of a v1.0 effort; they got a lot right. But there’s been one hell of a lot of experience with FBW since then and that experience suggests there are smarter ways than what Airbus chose back in the early 1980s.
When they next build a completely new model they will have to make the tradeoff between fealty to the 1980s design paradigm and jumping to something quite different. Sorta ironically, when they bought the Bombardier C-Series small jets and rebranded them the A220, they were faced with the “problem” that Bombardier had done the whole cockpit differently based on all those lessons learned that Airbus had been loth to incorporate. And they made noises about retrofitting the 220 with an old-style legacy Airbus cockpit for standardization. That idea died as soon as the engineering bean counters totted up the cost.
Maybe the 220 will turn out to the the shape of Airbus’ future cockpits. Maybe not.
Frankly, for both Boeing and Airbus, their next cockpits are going to be much more driven by ideas of single pilot, optional pilot, or no pilot at all operations than minutiae about the steering interface.
I suppose now that the danger is demonstrable, it’s definitely one less thing for pilot and copilot to overlook when dealing with a problem. if they remember…
Oh yeah. No doubt it’s a weak spot. The question is if it’s weak enough often enough to require the vast cost of retrofit to every Airbus still flying.
For sure the regulators could add something to the certification regs to require new designs after e.g. 1/1/2026 to have cross-pilot moving feedback in their control sticks. The danger there is that massively incentivizes not making new clean sheet designs and simply adapting old models well past the point that’s really wise.
Which is how you get 737 MAXs.
Re the number of pilots.
If it comes to the point where there is no Pilot at all I will have to reconsider flying to see family. I refuse to get into a sel;f-driving car and those are probably less dangerous than a self0flying airplane. Nope not me.
A self driving car has a lot more dangerous and ambiguous situations to face. A self flying aircraft is likely going to be much safer than self driving cars.
This isn’t an issue and, as @LSLGuy says, there’s nothing unique about Airbus in this respect, nearly every aircraft with side by side seating has shared engine controls in the middle and individual stick/yoke for each pilot. The left pilot flies with their left hand and uses their right hand for the throttle while the right pilot flies with the right hand and uses their left for the throttle. This is true from a Cessna 172 to Boeing, Airbus, de Havilland, BAe, etc. The part of the puzzle you’re probably missing is that flying is not a fine motor skill, it’s not like writing, or playing a guitar, you push/pull a lever to make the machine go where you want. I could do it with my feet if I had to. It really doesn’t matter which hand you use.
Not quite correct. Airbus aircraft don’t have physical feedback of what the other pilot is doing, moving one sidestick doesn’t move the other, but if both pilots make an input on the stick there’s a loud “DUAL INPUT” callout, so you definitely know if both pilots are trying to do different things, unless you’ve lost the plot, and the AIr France guys had lost the plot.
That’s debatable, but true or not, the consequences of an error in an aircraft are far greater than in a car. If a car doesn’t know what to do it can just stop on the side of the road and wait for help.
I might quibble with that. 