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Dorian Gray
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Paris, France
 
2012-04-28, 15:03

Quote:
Originally Posted by PKIDelirium View Post
Spacecraft control panels aren't supposed to be elegant and easy to use. It's really not much worse than a large airliner like a 747, A380 or the Concorde.
They should be elegant and easy to use! The shuttle's cockpit is a mess compared to an A380 or other modern airliner (but the Concorde and the original 747 were a mess too). Modern airliner cockpits are designed around the "dark-cockpit" concept to improve ease of use and therefore safety. The basic idea is that all annunciator lights are out when everything is configured properly. System failures and unsafe configurations are annunciated, thereby immediately getting the attention of the flight crew.

More recently, the dark-cockpit concept has been extended to "quiet cockpit" too: normal configurations are silent, so any sounds mean something must be dealt with.

The old-style cockpits had annunciators for all kinds of things, with different coloured lights meaning different things including "all okay". This made problems much harder to identify, which is one reason planes fell out of the sky a lot more often forty years ago!

Thanks for your photos.
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