The Airplane - Jay Spenser [87]
During the next decade, Britain introduced the Trident, VC-10, and BAC One-Eleven jet transports while the United States gave airlines the 727, DC-9, and 737. By the end of the 1960s, routes short and long were being flown by a variety of jets.
Stratocruiser crews contended with the most complex cockpit of any airliner.
Boeing
Jets were easier to fly from the flight crew’s perspective because eliminating piston engines and propellers also dispensed with a lot of complexity. For example, to change engine power settings on a DC-7, Douglas’ last propeller airliner, the flight crew had managed four controls per engine: throttle, mixture, propeller rpm, and boost (supercharging). In contrast, the DC-8 and other jetliners have just one thrust lever per engine.
This was a step in the right direction, but crews still contended with the need to scan and interpret a bewildering number of instruments. They were being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information presented by the round-faced electromechanical instruments then in use. Addressing this challenge, NASA led research aimed at processing this information and presenting it to flight crews on video screens. This industry-government collaboration defined effective graphic interfaces that organized the information and prioritized what the crew needed to know according to the immediate situation, with additional information readily available as desired.
The result was the modern glass cockpit, so called because it employs electronic flight instrument system (EFIS) screens to provide the pilot and copilot with the primary flight and navigation information formerly supplied by a variety of individual instruments. Yet more screens in the center of the instrument panel display engine information and perform crew-alerting functions.
EFIS debuted in airline service with the Boeing 767 in 1982 and Airbus A310 the following year. Universally adopted and often retrofitted to older jets, this display technology in conjunction with sophisticated flight management computers has revolutionized airline operations. As a result, modern flight decks have far fewer instruments and controls than earlier-generation flight decks.
Starting in the early 1980s, EFIS and flight-management computers so effectively reduced flight crew workloads that even the biggest jets no longer needed a flight engineer. Today glass cockpits are ubiquitous. Even the Airbus A380—the world’s largest commercial airliner—has a two-person flight deck, although its spacious cockpit also offers three jump seats.
Modern jetliners like the Airbus A380 rely on computerized “glass cockpits,” so named for their instrument display screens.
Air Team Images
Improvements continue apace as technology advances. One example is the adoption of flat-panel liquid-crystal display (LCD) screens that are larger, easier to read, take up less room, use less power, generate less heat, last longer, and are more reliable than the cathode ray tube (CRT) displays of first-generation EFIS. Whereas CRTs—which are like the picture tubes of old-fashioned television sets—wash out when direct sunlight splashes on them, LCD screens remain easy to read.
Farther down the line, these advanced screens may in turn give way to organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screens. Now being pursued by the consumer electronics industry, OLED displays promise to be still lighter in weight, sharper, and more colorful, and to use much less power. They will also be thinner—perhaps as little as a few millimeters—because they do not require internal backlighting, as do LCDs.
Ongoing human-factors research