Warning Caution and Advisory Colours
Hello flight testers,
A technical question related to flight test via FAR25. Part 25.1322 describes colours for warning, caution, safe operation and any other lights on the flight deck. Colours are red, amber, green and any other not including the above (to avoid confusion). Have been looking at some Boeing stuff which appears to use amber for both caution and advisory lights, and adds another group called 'pilot memo' which is white. This issue appears to be the desire to have two categories of caution for NNP (non-normal procedures) which are either system related (e.g. system hyd failure) or operationally related (e.g. VNAV disconnect). Of interest is that the 737 also uses blue alerts for system status information (e.g. APU power available, generator power available but not being used).
Colour convention that I can follow for 737NG (all?) might be:
Red for warnings
Amber for cautions
White for advisories (also armed FMA modes)
Green for safe aircraft config (also active FMA modes)
Blue for safe but ambiguous system states (could be good/bad...depending)
Magenta for selected values
Would love to hear the thoughts of flight testers on what is a good colour convention for flight deck alerting. Have reviewed AC25-11 which seems pretty dated. Specifically interested in how we should deal with lower level cautions that are more than advisories.
Regards,