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Aviation History
1995
1995 - 0074.PDF
TECHNOLOGY Lessons from the cockpit Airbus has learned a lot about the "glass cockpit", but there is much more to be gleaned. DAVID LEARMOUNT/LONDON I n little more than a decade, a breathtaking change has taken place in airliner-cockpit design, and in flight management and con trol technology, but some pilots believe that there is still much to be learned from they per ceive as "mistakes" which have been made. Pilots praise most of what has been done and hardly any would wish to abandon today's avionics for "traditional" cockpit instrumenta tion. They sometimes criticise modern flight- decks, however, and the automatic functions of digital flight-management systems (FMS) on the grounds that they can confuse aircrews despite being designed to make their jobs sim pler. FMS "mode-confusion" has caused pilots to make mistakes leading to serious incidents and even fatal accidents. The US Federal Aviation Administration is now setting up a commission to review the effectiveness of the modern airliner cockpit as a man/machine interface, and to examine the results of increased aircraft automation in human-factor and airline flight-safety terms (Flight International, 4-10 January, P9). The review starts early this year, as Boeing's first fly-by-wire (FBW) airliner, the 777, is pre pared for entry into revenue service. Oliver Will of the German pilots' union, Vereinigung Cockpit, who has flown the world's first digital FBW airliner, the Airbus Industrie A320, for Lufthansa, says: "It's a beautiful aeroplane. We love it. It's comfort able, it's safe — I never saw an aircraft going through windshear like an Airbus — but why build in so many traps?" The "traps" to which Will refers were high lighted in the September 1993 A320 accident at Warsaw, Poland, in which the aircraft land ed in a rainstorm with a high indicated air speed and a tailwind, aquaplaned and overran the runway. That cocktail of unfriendly conditions could go some way to explain the overrun, but never theless, according to the report, the incident probably would not have happened had the A320's protection systems not delayed deploy ment of the lift dumpers and reverse thrust, even though the pilot selected them. The pro- Airbus A300B2s and B4s have completely traditional instrument panels tection systems were designed to prevent deployment of lift-dumping spoilers and reverse thrust until the aircraft had definitely touched down. Vereinigung Cockpit believes that the A320's "extremely complex spoiler logic" was one factor in a long causal chain of events, most of which, Will acknowledges, were not aircraft-related. He adds: "It is quite normal with a new aircraft to have a learning process...we would never point our finger toward Airbus and claim that this is unusual." Airbus should, nevertheless, learn from its "mistakes", according to Will. DEVELOPMENT INFLUENCES Before die dramatic air-transport avionics changes in all die major manufacturers' types between 1981 and 1991, there had been no con ceptual change in aircraft man/machine-inter face design since the 1940s and, arguably, since well before that. Improvement in pre-1980s cockpits consisted of the gradual application of ergonomics — which is important, but not fun damental — and increasing sophistication in electro-mechanical (E-M) instruments. FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL 11 -17 January 1995
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