8 ms·

Do any pilots want to chime in about the utility/value of touchscreen UIs vs. tactile controls in planes? As a non-pilot I don't really want to comment, but I k

• correnos 9y ago
  They suck. I've flown in a Cessna with a touchscreen transponder, and it was nearly impossible to enter the required four-number code in light turbulence. edit: That said, you could probably make a decent aviation touchscreen. The main issue with off-the-shelf screens is it's easy to brush the wrong thing. A screen that takes significant pressure to register a touch would probably be usable, and for all I know this system might do that.
  • kakarot 9y ago
    Well, there's your next startup idea.
    • olympus 9y ago
      It's not really a startup idea, it's just a bad choice that was made when equipping the plane (often the manufacturer's choice, not the purchaser's). Button and dial based options exist for every instrument and piece of avionics, even modern systems. The person making the equipment selection just fell victim to slick advertising photos instead of practicality, or got conned into buying a Lynx because they thought they were getting some sort of deal.
    • crististm 9y ago
      Real knobs _work_ and _worked_ for the past 100 years. You could replace them with touch screens if their advantages were compelling.
      • leetcrew 9y ago
        the key advantage that touchscreens have is that they show many different displays to expose different controls and information, while a physical panel necessarily offers less functionality in the same cockpit area. i think it would be really nice to combine physical controls with a digital display. either the buttons themselves could have little displays that show different labels depending on which mode you're in, or there could be generic buttons/knobs around the display whose function changes depending on what UI page you're on.
        • VLM 9y ago
          Its interesting that its easier to buy physical flight instruments with alternative units (feet/min m/s or knots for a VSI, for example) than to buy physical flight instruments in foreign languages. Other than some Russian military gear, the whole world uses English language flight instruments. I've never flown outside CONUS the idea of a IFR approach or departure being defined in knots vertical is kinda weird but theoretically possible. Maybe its for balloons or something else non-general aviation. Being able to load up a touch screen transponder to read "ident" in hebrew or japanese is exciting both for native language familiarity and the inevitable random language changes while in flight. I can imagine the conversations on 121.5 already, "does anyone speak Romanian, my engine computer rebooted and now I can't figure out how to richen up my fuel mixture so I can land" "What is the Korean acronym for what in English is a NDB (non directional beacon)?" or whatever. At least while you're flying in Romania, even if no one speaks English you're at least surrounded by other Romanian speaking pilots also flying English language flight instruments.
    • _djo_ 9y ago
      Already exists. The only aircraft touchscreens I've used have been those from MGL Avionics [0], which required a firm intentional press and provided feedback. There's no reason to use screens that trigger on just a light touch. [0]: http://www.mglavionics.co.za/iEFIS.htm http://www.mglavionics.co.za/iEFIS.htm
• ryandrake 9y ago
  Physical UI affordances are extremely helpful anytime you need to interact with something in the cockpit and have your eyes on something else. The discrete click click of a radio knob lets you tune to a new frequency by counting the clicks. Having little handholds on the front bezels lets you steady your hand during turbulence as your finger hovers above a button. Different sized controls mean I can know without looking which one I’m grabbing. There are probably tons more examples—I’m not an avionics industrial designer. I suppose with practice you could navigate a touchscreen without looking but I’m not even there with my phone.
  • VLM 9y ago
    "Different sized controls mean I can know without looking which one I’m grabbing." Two famous examples, one WWII era plane had gear up crashes because pilots pulled the wrong lever up, until the engineers replaced the landing gear levers (right next to the throttles and mixtures) with stylized landing gear wheels. Another example was a nuclear power plant where all the primary coolant loops had the identical handles causing accidents until the ops replaced all of loop1 handles with coors beer tap handles, loop2 with bud tap handles, such that you'd instantly know if you're trying to drain loop2 and you're touching all bud levers except one coors tap, you're doing it wrong. Needless to say in both cases management wanted engineers to cut the cutesy stuff out and damn the safety results all we need is more abusive harder training because professional appearance is far more important than measurable safety increases. That's why we'll be stuck with ever increasing touch screens, more pilot error accidents or distracted driver accidents are a feature not a bug to a certain mindset that just wants to yell at and blame humans for being human.
• handedness 9y ago
  They’re terrible, especially in a turbulent and/or cold environment. A good EFIS should have physical buttons on the perimeter of the display, and many do.
• cmurf 9y ago
  Analog controls have a lot of physical feedback that a screen cannot mimic. Switches vs knobs. Some knobs are multi-detent switches. I can look at a radio, see the frequency, and know how many detents to get at or close to the desired new frequency while looking elsewhere because I can feel the increments happen, same for transponder codes, same for changing mode or view. And in turbulence and/or at night, or heavy workloads, it's even more handy. About the only replacement I can imagine being better is the Firefox (film/novel) interface. I'd even learn Russian just to have that interface. You must think in Russian.
• jacquesm 9y ago
  Not a pilot but like you I can't stand them cars. Tactile means I can keep my eyes on the road, which is the only thing that matters while driving. I found myself glancing at the screen before touching it and got rid of the touchscreen only device that was in my car and replaced it with something that has the major functions under a button. And I don't use it for navigation, I have a dedicated device for that I've placed on the right of the rear view mirror. Airplanes have to deal with turbulence and I really would not want to change any critical settings on a touch screen while being bounced around, I remember when I still had the bloody touchscreen device in the car I mis-touched and I had no idea how to get back to where it was before, it took a stop at a gas station to reset the interface. In general I think the obsession with getting rid of knobs and buttons is a bad thing. I'd love it if there was a general prohibition on touch screens in cars, I'm pretty sure that it is a safety issue. Any device that requires that you take your eyes of the road in a vehicle is a bad device.
  • mkempe 9y ago
    I agree. Even with force feedback I don't think these interfaces will ever be as good as physical knobs, buttons, and sliders. "Good" in the sense that they can be reached, perceived, and manipulated with our senses completely without eyesight. For instance I recently drove a Volvo V90 (every control on a large flat screen) and the climate control for seat heating was tiny and slow to update -- I had to take my eyes off the road to find it, aim at the specific setting I wanted, and wait to see whether the setting had changed as intended; by contrast in my current Volvo V60 there are physical buttons that I press (without aiming because I know exactly where each one is) and they instantly change the settings as desired.
    • domevent 9y ago
      Could haptic feedback be “granular” enough to mimic specific shapes of knobs and switches?
      • pasbesoin 9y ago
        Introduce vibration. Physical controls give you a topology to orient to. A flat screen doesn't. Every control becomes an exercise in sustained hand-eye coordination. Talk about your distracted driving -- or flying. Can haptic feedback really help with that? (Serious question: I haven't had the opportunity.)
• icegreentea2 9y ago
  In the specific context of fighter jets, its worth pointing out a few trends. a) As many critical controls as possible are already stuck on the stick and throttle. For an example (ok, technically from a game/simulator, but close enough), http://falcon4.wikidot.com/avionics:hotas http://falcon4.wikidot.com/avionics:hotas . b) The expectation is that fighter combat will continue to evolve to become ever more information dominant. That means having the ability to gather, process, and act on as many information as possible, and faster than the opponent. This means information rich displays that given today's limitations on HUDs and HMDs, still means the pilot will have to look down anyways to fully exploit their information. So instead of comparing touchscreen controls to say... touchscreen controls for your radio in your car, consider if your job was to drive, while also like... playing an air traffic controller game or something.
  • bri3d 9y ago
    That's a good point - I guess playing Falcon 4.0 is a good parallel (which makes sense, given how detailed a sim it is!), since I don't find myself needing to point-n-click over to too many onscreen cockpit controls while playing. I think what struck me about the (probably fake) image was that the pilot was entering something on what looks like a virtual DED, which seems like a tedious task even while not flying a plane. I wonder if any of the lower panels have kept a tactile DED or numpad.
    • icegreentea2 9y ago
      Oh, that's a good point. No idea how fake that is... But, Elbit's line of next gen cockpits have the trade name of 'CockpitNG', and here's their sales brochure (http://elbitsystems.com/media/CockpitNG.pdf http://elbitsystems.com/media/CockpitNG.pdf). You can see that their main render/concept has plenty of dedicated entry devices left. I'm pretty confident that that render is off some legit production or semi production CAD models cause they bothered to leave in the USB port. Now, there's no knowing what the Qatari's actually ordered - I'm sure Elbit and Boeing would happily modify the cockpit interior to order. But I think from that picture, you can be pretty confident that plane makers aren't just nilly willy throwing away physical controls.
  • 9y ago
• olympus 9y ago
  Private pilot and military officer here (but not military pilot). On the military side, touchscreens suck horribly but are already being crammed into planes where soft buttons on the side of a display and controls on throttle and stick are already solutions that work fine. F-15s also have (depending on country) head tracking in the form of HMCS, so doing a gaze based interface is feasible and a better solution than touchscreens. Honestly, page-based systems that can be accessed with a castle/boat switch is fine for modern fighters and trained pilots. Hearing a trained Eagle driver rattle off how to get to a specific menu/page from any other page is pretty impressive- "You need to change missile mode but you're on the ECS page? Back, down, down, right, right. [or something like that]" And they aren't even sitting in the plane or looking at the screens, it's just muscle memory. Non-military specific, and the biggest con of touchscreens in a cockpit: - Turbulence makes it hard to hit the right places on the touchscreen. Traditionally you'd rest your hand or stabilize a few fingers on the outside of your radio/navigator before twirling the dials or pushing buttons, and there was enough resistance to keep from accidental presses. With stuff like the GTN 650 pushing the screen out to the edges, resting your hand on the bezel means you accidentally make touches to the edge of the screen. Competitors like Avidyne actually market old school buttons as a feature, and it's a compelling one. Military specific concerns: - Wearing gloves while flying means that button size needs to be huge and touchscreens aren't very precise. - High-G maneuvers make it really hard to touch the right part of the screen.
  • fapjacks 9y ago
    All of the touchscreen UIs I used when I was in the infantry actually were mostly pretty good. The contractors seem to have been told explicitly that people will be wearing gloves or using knuckles in generally poor operating conditions. The sensitivity always seemed just right and it was almost impossible to accidentally send an unintentional input unless you hit the wrong button thinking you were hitting another. For example using the Blue Force Tracker inside a gun truck at night on shitty roads wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be.
    • olympus 9y ago
      Grunts have to live with stuff because they have no other choice. Pilots are zipper suited gods whose complaints actually matter. All joking aside, they have human factors experts work on the UI, and it must go through operational testing- passing isn't a requirement though- systems have been fielded with failing UI evaluations because they were super effective. But pilots still hate touchscreens even though a lot of thought was put into making them suck less.
• inamberclad 9y ago
  Not a fast jet pilot, but in smaller aircraft with much less wing loading we can get tossed around a lot by turbulence. While a bunch of touchscreens have found their way into general aviation aircraft and seem to be received well, they're always fairly small, no larger than the iPads that are often used for maps and navigational databases.
• cameldrv 9y ago
  As others have said, touchscreens suck in planes. Particularly in turbulence, they're very hard to use. The problem is twofold. First, when you're flying, you're usually multitasking. It's very useful to be able to perform tasks with the electronic gadget without looking at it. If there are physical buttons, you can find the right control by feel. You can't do that with a touchscreen. If things are a little bumpy, the tactile feedback is also very useful because you can subconsciously tell when you are about to push a button or turn a click knob without actually doing it, based on the force feedback. Since the whole thing isn't touch sensitive, you can also brace your hand with your other three fingers against the panel so that it doesn't move during turbulence. I fly gliders a lot as well as small single engine planes, and I really like the LK8000 software for gliders. It has a "turbulence proof" interface. Even though it's a touchscreen, the interface mostly restricts itself to touch events like "top half or bottom half of screen" or "corner of screen." The UI then provides unique audio feedback. Between the two, it's possible to use the UI to get to a particular view of information without looking at the screen. UIs that require you to do things like precisely tap on the icon of one airport among many in the middle of the screen are almost unusable.
• huffmsa 9y ago
  Trying to operate touch screen buttons (even flat glass ones) in a car on winter pavement, with gloves on has made me quite sad over the past 4 months. Without fail, I wait and wait and almost always hit a bump right when I go in for the button press. The manual shift lever and physical dials for the air-conditioning are 100% reliable, by contrast.
  • alphadevx 9y ago
    I'm still aghast that Tesla decided to go "all-in" with touch screen controls in their latest car, big step back in ergonomics (and even safety!) for the reasons you have given and more. I would never buy a car with one big touch screen.
    • huffmsa 9y ago
      I know it doesn't apply to Tesla's since they only have motors and batteries to monitor, but the more physical instrumentation and analog controls I have, the better I feel. Not much of a more clear "you missed that shift" feedback loop than hearing gears crunch and the shift lever vibrating like a magic wand.
• pc86 9y ago
  My plane has the GTN650[0] and it's fine up to and including light turbulence, but it's going to be largely dependent on your overall panel setup. My panel is situated such that I can steady my hand on other things while utilizing the touch screen. If you had a different panel setup you might have issues in anything but smooth air. And remember there are knobs on the GTN650 that you can use too, you're not required to use the touchscreen. As far as situational aware, you're going to be looking away from the windscreen no matter what. Touchscreen v. tactile doesn't change that at all. Personally, touchscreen like the 650 is more intuitive to me than something tactile like a G1000, but the G1000 is also cramming a lot more info onto the screen. I just never liked reassigning unlabeled buttons to do something on the screen, it makes developing muscle memory harder (for me). [0] https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/67884 https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/67884