There are actually very few instruments that are duplicated for redundancy.A Dash 8 has a standby (third) altimeter, a standby (third) attitude indicator and just one magnetic compass (backup for the HSI and RMIs.) Everything else is one per pilot or one per engine. Instead of additional gauges redundancy is achieved by having duplicate power sources for the important instruments (pneumatic instruments such as altimeters, vertical speed indicators, and airspeed indicators have a backup air supply.)
Something to note with cockpit pictures is that all of the engine instruments and controls will normally be represented once for each engine*, so a B747 will have four of everything. This makes cockpits look more complicated than they really are.
*The Shrike is one aircraft I’ve flown that had dual needle engine instruments. The manifold pressure, for example, was shown on one instrument with two needles. It made it easy to match engine indications and you can see from the photo that space was at a premium.
This thread reminds me of a cartoon I saw once. An airline pilot is talking to a visitor in the cockpit. ‘All these dials? They’re mostly just for show. But don’t tell anyone, otherwise everyone would want to be a pilot!’
Sorta related-a few years back, the Honda Prelude had a unique design speedometer/tachometer that used the same guage face-the tach needle was inside the speedo needle-I liked the look.
Most people didn’t-they drpped the design.
In light training aircraft stalling of the wings is typically preceded by a pronounced buffet which can be felt through the controls and airframe. If you ever feel this buffet it’s the first indication, often accompanied by an aural stall warning horn, that you are about to stall and you should reduce the angle of attack on the wing (normally by lowering the nose slightly, increasing power, and increasing airspeed.) If you ignore it the wing will probably stall and the nose of the aircraft will drop. You can still recover by relaxing any back pressure on the controls, lowering the nose, thereby reducing the angle of attack. That’s how it works on simple aircraft and it is what pilots are used to.
On more complex aircraft the pre-stall buffet can be very subtle or non-existent. One of the minimum design features for an aircraft is that it must have adequate warning of a stall. When the airframe itself doesn’t provide the cues pilots are used to, artificial devices are used instead. The stick shaker is an artificial stall warning device that activates prior to the stall and imitates (and exaggerates) the pre-stall buffet through the control column. This is the pilot’s call to wake up, lower the nose slightly, and increase power and airspeed.
On some aircraft the actual stall itself may be sufficiently dangerous that it should not be allowed to occur at all. These aircraft will have a stick pusher which pushes the control column forward thereby automatically lowering the nose so that the stall is avoided. The pusher normally activates after the shaker though if the angle of attack is increasing rapidly they may occur at the same time.
The natural stalling characteristics of swept wing aircraft and T-tail aircraft are often less than satisfactory so stick pushers are common on commercial jets and sometimes fitted to T-tail turbo-props.
The Colgan Dash 8 crash in Buffalo NY was ultimately caused by the pilot’s inappropriate response to the stick shaker and stick pusher. For some reason he pulled back on the column when the shaker activated, the pusher then activated and he continued pulling back against the pusher all the way to the ground.
Edit: Reasons that no buffet is felt on complex/larger aircraft include the size, the placement of the tail plane relative to the main wing, and the use of hydraulic controls which prevent real feed-back from the controls surfaces to the control column.
The sacred 6 is probably the same as the “six-pack” (reference to a “six-pack of beer”). The T is a subset of the six-pack which is airspeed indicator, attitude indicator, and altimeter across the top with the turn-coordinator, direct indicating compass, and vertical speed indicator across the bottom. They form the primary instruments used for instrument flying though you should be able to cope without the AI and VSI.
Incidentally the bottom row on that Slingsby is, from left to right, a G-meter, a horizontal situation indicator (HSI), and an automatic direction finder (ADF). The G-meter has three needles, one showing the current G reading, and the other two showing maximum and minimum values since the last reset. The HSI is a heading indicator with a navigation overlay from either a VOR or an ILS and the ADF is a simple instrument that points a needle to a non-directional navigation beacon. You can combine the functions of the HSI and ADF and get rid of the heading indicator, that would make that cockpit a bit nicer for instrument flying.
Even way back in the 60s the designers had some things figured out!
Today cockpits look much cleaner because we have the technology and the FAA has signed off on it to make everything much easier to read.
But back in the day, they still tried!
The engine gauges (the two stacks on the right) were set up so that you could quickly tell if there was a problem with one engine. You didn’t need to see that one gauge was out of tolerance - you needed to see that one gauge did not match the others.
The other stuff was stuck where it could be, but with some thought. Hydraulics? Two separate systems, but at least the gauges are close!
For a pilot, the worst thing is a LACK of information. I would rather have TOO MUCH info than not enough. Today the designers and the pilots work together, so that the info I want is the info I get, presented smartly by the displays.
Remember that we crashed a lot more airplanes in the 60s than we do today, and better instrumentation is one of the reasons. Of course, SR-71s weren’t flying into Hong Kong or JFK then, so you have that as well. In any case, that thing was a complex beast and I am glad that I never had to work it!!
Actually, the 5 on the airspeed indicator is 500 knots. The Mach meter is the small wedge inside the airpseed indicator. The markings under that wedge rotate to align the actual Mach number with the main pointer which points to the outer scale of knots indicated airspeed.
Pilot141: Long time no read. How you likin’ the MD11? I flew the 717 for awhile which was the same avionics package except for a blank area where the center engine indicators had been. It was always a very nice place to work.
Overall, the SR71 cockpit looks just like what it is/was: typical layout for a high performance aircraft of the era. Any of the Century series fighters or the F-4 look the same. As does the T-38.
And the Navy’s A-3, A-4, A-5 & A-7. The A-6 had a weird TV screen for a central display, a forerunner of the EFIS systems of the 80s & later. But all of its peripheral gauages had the same look too.
I like the thing - not only the automation but also the trips. Leaving next week on an around-the-world trip, and I get to fly along L-888, an airway that goes over the Himalayas and can only be flown with CPDLC operational. The FMS on the -11 doesn’t look as fancy as some of the newer ones (it’s all green) but it sure is capable of some fancy stuff! We’ve got the Electronic Flight Bag on about 75% of the planes and the HUD on about 25% of them now, so it’s getting to be pretty high-tech.
No, unfortunately. The reactor did not contribute any power to the airplane, it was merely to perform basic research on such things as shielding and radiation dosage. Long story short, no reactor-powered plane could carry enough shielding to lift itself off the ground (at least if you wanted the crew to survive). There was talk of an unmanned remote controlled “tug” that could tow manned bombers at a safe distance, but the program got cancelled before they reached that stage.
The B-36 is indeed cool; it’s a pity there are NO flyable B-36’s left. Apparently their design meant their engines, props and airframes took a heavy beating and they were all scrap by the end of their service lives.
I have no idea, not having been in a position to ask questions without getting some pointed questions in return. I would guess mostly 1. Yes the skin would get awfully hot in flight but even if it had not cooled down by the time you got back and taxied to the hanger, you could eject the cartridge in the hanger if all you were worried about was burnt fingers. As for 3, I don’t recall hearing of any SR-71 crashes during the period – Yup, Wiki says they were four years into a seventeen year crash-free period at the time.
Thanks, my favorite aircraft of all time after the YF-12A.
The Gotterdammerung interceptor, carrying a nuclear missile to shoot down squadrons of Russian bombers over Canada.
