How hard is it to fly--at least take off and land--a military/civil jet if you' we never flow it?

[AK84]

@LSLGuy

@AK84: All of those get pretty scary-looking to me. The F-22 driver would recognize at least the idea instantly.

The hard part is in the details. Maybe those computer screens just wake up in a fully useable form. If so all I need to do is start the damn thing.

Maybe there’s 10 minutes of key-stroking needed just to fly around the traffic pattern. If so that’s not very discoverable.

If you’ve ever rented a car you’ve no doubt noticed that operating the car is easy and standardized. Operating the radio or the climate control system is not so simple & standard though. And god forbid the damn thing have a GPS navigator. I swear no two of those have any UI logic in common.

Anyone who thinks computer UIs are necessarily “intuitive” never gave one to somebody with little background in computers. “Discoverablity” is the current ideal in UI design; it means you can explore in a semi-directed fashion and pretty soon find what you need. For flying the problem is we don’t have time to “discover”. Once we’re in motion we need to know. Easier to do when there’s 10 labeled toggle switches rather than when it’s 175 options under 5 different multi-layer menus on different screens.

Oh yeah. Discoverability= makes me want to take a pick axe to the dashboard.
You do raise an interesting point about glass cockpits generally. How much of an improvement are there really to the old input styles? They look awesome, but for fighters (and commercial airliners) are they all they are cracked up to be?