F/Os were always out of the systems loop on the 707 727 and Classic. The gear lights on the classic systems panel are easily seen from the L seat.
Those two little airlines Ansett and TAA started with the jets in the sixties. Through the seventies and eighties they worked up ways of doing things which, by the mid eighties, were resulting in operational and safety statistics so far in front of the rest of the world that for a period in the mid eighties the rest of the world was going out there and flying with them to try and get a drift on how it was done.
What went wrong?