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Old 5th Jun 2011, 02:22
  #1401 (permalink)  
engine-eer
 
Join Date: May 2007
Location: USA
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Even a moving needle on a digital display doesn't get the mental recognition and attention that the real thing gets.
Remember in the mid-eighties that a lot of performance cars were going to video display full digital dashboards with no analog gages????

Then the guys actually running cars on the track figured out that good old analog gages were actually better. They found the driver didn't have to actually look at the gages to know all was ok and what the car was doing. The information was received and processed by the subconscious within the normal scan of the instruments because the regular positions of the needles were within the driver’s memory. Not sure that tapes can give the same situational awareness as good old fashioned gages.

I'm sure modern glass cockpits are much better than steam gages, but maybe there are some things like altitude, airspeed and vertical speed that might be better presented by a gage.
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