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Space Shuttle Flight Deck
- j-g-faustus 15y agoInteresting, thanks for the link. I guess this is similar to what non-programmers see when looking at source code: An impenetrable mess of gobbledygook where it would require months or years of dedicated effort to figure out what the different commands actually do.
- beagledude 15y agoThis might be the coolest thing I see all year
- barik 15y agoI chuckled when rotating the image and seeing the Dell laptop in the back.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- lamby 15y agoThis actually reminded me of Stargate SG-1 - everywhere they went they popped open a chunky Dell machine and started typing. (It's an interesting thought that it would have cost about $50,000 to get that laptop into space, weight-wise.)
- mdda 15y agoNot if they went through the gate...
- there 15y agoi wonder if they gave up on thinkpads when lenovo bought the division, as some US government agencies did. http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/space/space_thinkpad.html http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/space/space_think...
- skeletonjelly 15y agoWhat did they change to?
- there 15y agoi think hp and dell.
- techiferous 15y agoI'm a big fan of minimal interfaces. But I guess minimal interfaces are good for the web user who is looking at your web app for two seconds before deciding whether to keep looking or move on. This actually looks like a pretty effective interface for users who are willing to be trained for months. Think about it: after you are trained, every piece of information is just one glance away and every action is just one button click away. I'd love to hear an opinion from an expert, though. sinks back into his armchair
- cynest 15y agoI found a picture of an A380 cockpit and it appears to have that design philosophy. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Airbus_A380_cockpit.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Airbus_A3...
- hollerith 15y agoNuke plants have a great many buttons, dials, gauges and levers, too, according to one of Don Norman's books. ADDED. Norman said that one of the advantages is that when one operator lowers the aperture on value 68 (or whatever) the other operators can easily tell that that is what he is doing.
- ugh 15y agoAs you can see there are a lot of big screens and very few actual buttons and switches in that photo. It looks like the four keyboards are the bulk of the buttons. I would be curious to know how modal those screens are and how much information they can display at one point in time. It doesn’t look like they can display much and I can’t imagine that it’s fun to go hunting for necessary information in an emergency. Depending on how that works it might be a usability nightmare, one can only hope that Airbus does plenty of UI testing. (In that context an interesting question is what this interface is optimized for. It may work great on normal flights – that’s nearly all of them, by the way – but break down horribly in emergencies. I guess the UI design rule of designing for the common and not the rare case doesn’t really apply here.)
- ben1040 15y agoThe biggest "user interface" feature I noticed wasn't the buttons -- it's that there's velcro, and lots of it, everywhere. Well done.
- bestes 15y agoFlash required
- fnazeeri 15y agoWeird how they assume the pilot is left handed...
- VBprogrammer 15y agoActually that is not the assumption at all. The assumption in both the space shuttle and most other (fixed-wing) aircraft is that the pilot is right handed. However, what you don't expect is that actually most of the really fiddly work happens with the right hand, changing settings, pressing buttons, tuning radio's and writing down notes. The left hand has to be taught to fly but thats actually less demanding that teaching the left hand to do that other stuff. This is even true of aircraft which have yokes rather than side-sticks, as the throttles are controlled by the right hand and during the take-off and landing the right hand is stationed on the throttles. Interestingly for a helicopter this pattern is reversed, the control inputs required to control a helicopter are so much more demanding that the pilot sits on the right hand side so that he uses his right hand for the primary control and has to either make do with his left or temporarily switch hands to do the other stuff described above.
- theatrus2 15y agoVery common setup in side-sticked airplanes (compared to center-stick or yoke).
- ltamake 15y agoNot really all that different from an jet airplane cockpit. I'm an aviation enthusiast, btw.
- antimora 15y agoWell, user interface is full of short-cuts, which makes sense considering pilot would not have time to flip through pages to execute a command. The seats look awfully uncomfortable, though.
- cl8ton 15y agoWell so much for heads up displays. That was a cool shot of the shuttle I've never seen before. I wonder how many of those controls are redundant systems you only need to touch if they light up?