switches in standard positions
Forget, Dozy…..
Interesting you refer to the 'where to put what committee' and to “remember the Trident was designed in the late '50s. Ergonomics was in its infancy and commonality across types was practically unheard of!” While I’m pretty sure the decisions in this case were taken in-house, I don’t know how much awareness there is of the airline industry's actual cockpit “where to put what" committee. It dates from the late 1940s when the US airline industry started acquiring lots of ex-military transport aircraft, which came with a variety of instruments scattered in all sorts of places and ended up in accidents because the pilots became confused about what was where on different aircraft of allegedly the same type.
I believe it was Scott Flower who was chief (test) pilot for Pan Am who got some of the other chief pilots together to try and get some standardisation into civil cockpits, and started with really enforcing the implementation of the “Basic T” that we see today. That kind of work became formalised under the banner of the Society of Automotive Engineers as “SAE Technical Committee S-7, Flight Deck & Handling Qualities Standards for Transport Aircraft”.
I had the privilege of being a member of it for quite a few years and chaired it for a while before I retired. It was an extremely interesting group to be involved with, as the pilot members were all either senior test pilots from the major manufacturers and authorities or chief technical pilots from the major airlines, plus we had a lot of very good engineering and research guys as well. The official output is “Aerospace Recommended Practices” but bureaucratic inertia and commercial pressures meant, as always with standardisation activity, that it actually reflected the past while trying to address the future. Remember also the two rules about standardising things: “the great thing about having standards is that there are so many from which to choose” ; and “the BEST is the enemy of the merely GOOD” !
In reality by far the most valuable aspect was the informal discussions, as for example Boeing and Airbus test pilots could get “off the record” criticism and comment on their products from people they respected, and feed that back up the chain in a way that wouldn’t have otherwise been politically acceptable. However on many occasions of course there were “agreements to disagree” after debates that took place more in the bar afterwards than in the committee sessions – it was a very social group! The requirement that you had to be an active pilot to vote was important in keeping things fresh but I think the economic squeeze has reduced industry willingness to release people for such activities. A great pity really. Anyway, I’ll have to try and see if there’s an ARP which refers to positioning of radio transmit switches!