This is at the heart of what utterly astounds me about the recent regulatory controversy about pilot CVD:
The feeling I got from those I spoke to (including a number of international delegates), was that this discrepancy would be better resolved by tightening the current standard rather than relaxing it. This was due to the complex, and often relatively subtle use of colour in modern cockpits (it is no longer a red/green/white environment).
Demonstrably very intelligent people who presume to make judgments about people’s fitness to fly are apparently incapable of perceiving – dare I say: are blind to? – the potential invalidity of the proposition on which their conclusion and consequent regulatory intervention depends.
“There is complex, subtle use of colours in modern cockpits. It is no longer a red/green/white environment.”
So what?
In the normally certified aircraft I fly most often, there is a system that has a red light which illuminates when the system is in a particular state. There is another system which has a blue light which flashes when other systems are in particular states. There is yet another system which has an orange light that illuminates when that system is in a particular state.
Neither the colour nor the difference between the colours of those lights has any actual or intuitive implication for the relative importance of the system state indicated. I know what it means when each light is on, and I know what it means when each light is off. And that’s all I need to know from a safety perspective.
If I changed all those light colours to Mission Brown or Barry White, it wouldn’t make a schmick of difference.
When a big CAUTION light flashes, one does not need to pause to consider whether it’s Duck Egg Blue or Mojave Mist.
The proposition implicit in the quote is that there is a safety risk if pilots cannot distinguish between the subtly different colours in complex cockpits. That proposition has never been proved. All of the evidence is to the contrary. Objective people can see that.