What you're not taking into account in your posts is that a lot of the examples cited are from decades before the introduction of glass cockpits ...
Dozy, that makes no difference. In fact, it makes no difference whether the human subjects are pilots or not - all humans will have the same problems with tapes. This is because of how our brains work.
The Boeing research in the 1980s and the paper quoted does not take into account the possible bias inherent in the results due to most pilots of the day being more experienced with dials than tapes.
Do you actually know how the Boeing research was conducted? You make it sound like they just asked a couple of old-timers for their opinions. Here is that bit about Boeing again:
The Boeing Company conducted extensive research in the mid 1980’s into vertical tape instruments, finding some concerns:
They lacked relationships that were used extensively by pilots in performing flight tasks. This perception was strengthened by human factors research, which also concluded that, in general, moving scale displays are not as effective as moving pointer displays.
Driven by explicit airline demands for the maintenance savings of CRTs over electromechanical pointers and the space requirements of matching the Airbus eight-inch screens, Boeing eventually chose vertical tapes for the 747-400.
I'd imagine that a noticeable EICAS warning would be generated, and hopefully tell the PNF exactly where the problem lay ...
That would be a poor solution - which would also make the cockpit just that little bit more complex.
20 needles that should all be pointing in the same direction, combined with a human eye and experience, is to me the most optimum relationship that we can have between man and machine. From just a glance the pilot could see that 20 big and important parameters were normal - can it get any better than that?
Some of those needles might have been dancing around or jittering, but the human is so good at filtering such observations that that would have made no difference to the big picture. To a computer, however, jitter or noise on the parameters may give rise to nuisance warnings.
When instrumentation was using the big pointers and making use of the human sensitivity to parallelism we were at the pinnacle in cockpit ergonomics, in my opinion. Since then, we have gone backwards.
After the Strasbourg Airbus accident, it was suggested by some that the presence of a big fat VSI needle parked in the 5 o'clock position instead of the 7 0'clock mark, may have alerted that crew to their excessive RoD.
Excellent point, BARKINGMAD. I have been meaning to comment on the VS presentation as I believe that too is woefully deficient. VS is not as important as airspeed, hence my silence until now.
I agree that, had that crew had the big VS dial of yesteryear, they may well have noticed that something was not quite right.
Look at that picture of the A330 PFD that Dozy posted. I have complained about the size of the tiny patch in the middle of the airspeed tape before, but the VS indication area is even more tiny! (On that PFD design, anyway).
OK465, do you know exactly how the A330 arrives at "computed airspeed"? Please enlighten me if you do. If the aircraft had had the big round dial from day 1, then the way the airspeed was computed may not have been the same as it was for the PFD. Also, to save me delving into the report, which ADC was feeding the FDR?
... with a press of a couple of buttons ( if I can remember which ! ) change the 'picture' to a digitalised display of 'round' instruments, to increase my comfort zone.
ExSp33db1rd, you and the round dials are a good fit. Not because you are an 'old fart', but because you are a human being. Keep using them. You and your passengers are safer for it, and we now know that there is some scientific support for this conclusion!