Mountainsnake
What's all this obsession with the sidestick (mainly from other manufacturers lovers...)? Why would one want a yoke if there are no cables, springs, whatever, to pull? It's illogical to use a yoke on a fly-by-wire aircraft. Should we all be typing with a typewriter (mechanical) instead of our keyboards?
You are right, it looks natural and the basic idea is not bad at all, and it has proved to be safe and workable as the thrust levers do as well.
But it lacks two important features, a yoke or a stick or conventional throttle linkage in former A/C provided:
- tactile feedback from flightcontrols / throttle position
- tactile feedback from the second set of control input, being it SS or yoke.
Those feedbacks are negligable when things work out straight forward, they are missing when things start to get wrong in more ways:
- it is easy to get out of the loop and be caught by surprise (flightcontrol imputs / throttle position prior something going wrong not known)
- it is hard to catch up and make the correct input (if the inputs / position prior something going wrong is not known, the input might be wrong as well)
- it takes more time for the feedback loop, as the action first needs to be transferred to the flight controls / engines and the resulting change later on gets displayed to the panel and has to be picked up by the eyes.
- this feedback over the panel needs an input channel (the eyes) which might be at itīs limit already, saturated by things gone wrong.
- as this process is not a single one, but has to take place several times in a short period of time with changing parameters, references and environmental and human factors, it influences and hinders other necessary processes of the senses, other channels of human sensing as well.
Let me use your exemple of the keyboard here. If you plug everything on one hub to your PC system and saturate that channel, you might not only slow your system down, you may loose some letters, and there might other input/ output demands been affected to.
The keyboards still have the initial feedback of a typewriter, you press the key, the initial force is higher, and when you reach the point where the key sends the letter on its way to the system, the force resistance brakes down. That way i dont have to look at my screen to see the letter written down, i can feel it. On my iphone there is no tactile feedback from the keys, i have to check the screen or i switch on the aural feedback.
Typewriter is out for 30 years, but we still use the keyboard the same way as an typewriter. Why did the hardware manufacturers do that? Because itīs easier to write that way.
I think nobody really needs the yoke back,or cables and pulleys, but why not build in the features, which would keep the nice design and functions of the SS / autothrottles and provide the desired tactile feedback? It would make things still more safer and not unsafe at all. Most is built in anyway. Feedback loops to the flightcontrol computers are already present, so imho its the SS and throttle mechanics that need to change and some programming to get the feedback info present in the Flightcontrol computer to output the respective signal and create the artificial feedback signal to the changed mechanics. It costs money, so what? Flying is too cheap anyway, in two weeks i go on leave to Sardegna, the two way trip for three persons is under 150.- . I would not care to pay 50.- more.
Safety Concerns
So we already have an operational system that has been scientifically proven to save butts more often. Therefore the answer may well lie in a different approach to training including more hands on time.
You still miss the point. Nobody wants to change the system back and make it more unsafe, call it further development under new aspects.
With training you are so right, but you do not overlook the consequences. The things we talk about here can only be trained in a limited way, as the saturation of the channels (eyes, ears) are natural and can be influenced only in a limited way by training, and i mean by a lot of training.
Training would have to be done in relation to real dogsh**t situations, and part of it in the real aircraft.
The approach of new technology however was and is and has to be in the future to get things like flying and training for flying easier, simpler and also cheaper.
For this task the system-human interface has to change in some points, the training has to change as well undoubtedly, and management has to allow their pilots more hands on stick in the real aircraft.
Edit: Most gear handles are still shaped in the form of an wheel, and flap handles like an airfoil. Because of tactile feedback. One of those can be found and handled in the dark without looking at them. Did somebody had the idea already to change those into an pushbutton on the top panel? I hope not.