Pilots make flying an airplane look easy, almost automatic. So what are all those hundreds of buttons and controls in the cockpit for?
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Honestly, *everything* they could hope to control.
The stuff on the ceiling tends to be more mechanical. Turning on lights, redirecting airflow, starting up the Aux Power Unit (APU, the generator in the tail of the plane), windshield wipers, the exterior lights, fuel pumps, power sources, hydraulics and their power sources, pressurization control of the plane, the switch that turns on the Fasten Seatbelt sign, etc. Some are emergency/last ditch controls for things that normally should be done with easier to reach controls, or are duplicate displays for redundancy. The higher up you go, the less likely you are to need to operate them since they get harder and harder to reach while the pilot is in their seat.
Now… this varies by plane, so what I’m describing is the plane I know best (in the big jet category). Just under the windscreen is likely the autopilot controls. You tell it what direction to go, what altitude to fly at, what speed to fly at, or you tell it to abide by the flight plan that’s been programmed.
Under that is where you’ll mostly find the gauges and displays, and buttons that control them. The map screen will let you choose zoom levels, pick what overlays you want to see (terrain and/or weather radar, airports en route, your flight path shown, etc). Your current speed, altitude, heading/compass, are right in front of the pilots here, and engine stats are off to the side.
Between the pilots are the more commonly operated controls… the engines themselves, flaps on the wings, speed brakes, etc. As you go down further you’ll probably find the radio, transponder and radio pathfinder.
There are a lot of switches because there are so many things to be controlled on such a large plane. The pilots are the only ones up there once you’re in the air, and if anything goes wrong they either land or crash. Suffice to say we prefer the former.
Cockpits for a very long time were analog systems. That means every switch did exactly one thing. There is one switch each to turn off engine 1, 2, 3, and 4. There are 4 switches for engine fire suppression. The wings and fuselage have many moving parts, each with separate controls.
They add up fast.
While computers can manage most of this, arguably making the switches obsolete, you still want to have control when there is computer failure.
believe it or not, most of them are only used for turning on the planes and getting the systems ready. in flight the pilot may only use the glass cockpit, autopilot panel, radio panel and fuel switches. 99% of flying is the prep. I.e entering info in the FMS, calculating fuel, centre of gravity etc.
There really aren’t that many buttons on planes anymore and there haven’t been for quite a while. Back in the day, airplanes had a lot of buttons and knobs and switches because everything was analog, but now, most aircraft systems are computerized. As you see in [this photo of a modern Boeing 787 flight deck](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Boeing_787-8_N787BA_cockpit_%28cropped%29.jpg?20200130151612), the controls are dominated by 4 large computer screens. There aren’t all that many manual buttons and switches.
That said, planes are still complicated and have a lot of systems, and they all need controls. Not every aspect of a plane is about hands-on flying it. For example, you need controls for the autopilot, radios and navigation systems, engines, power systems, fuel flow and control, the various internal and external lights, cabin interior pressure and temperature, de-icing, emergency systems (ditching, evacuation, fire suppression…etc).
Analogize to your car. To actually drive the car, you really only *need* a steering while, shifter, and brake, right? But you also have buttons for the turn signal, windshield wipers, gas cap and trunk, radio, heat and AC…etc. A plane is just that but more complicated because it has to fly and it has to be really safe.
[Here’s a good video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNIP7t-fH3c) that shows all the various panels and displays on the flight deck of an Airbus A320. It’s not narrated but you can see all the buttons and knobs are labeled and get an idea of what they do.
In older aircraft, there are switches to control the electrical systems, hydraulic systems, engines, radios, etc. A lot of those switches allow you to isolate broken systems, turning off various parts of that system.
When learning to fly, you spend hundreds of hours in simulators learning exactly what each of those switches do, and learn hundreds of pages from the manual that details how the airplane works. It’s a complicated system, but once you’ve learned one airplane, a lot of the knowledge transfers to the next. The exception being that most of the newer and more modern aircraft use glass displays (think computer monitors) to display all the information and they have levels of selectable menus to “activate” those switches. Only those that are critical to functioning during a power or computer loss are still physical switches.
Uhh, a lot of stuff that’s important in some cases but not important in others.
https://www.cockpitrevolution.com/cockpits/b747-cockpit.htm#!/Boeing-747-Classic-100-200-300-SP-Cockpit-Poster-Printed/p/155320136/category=60726380
Here’s a poster with a diagram and layout of the cockpit of a Boeing 747 classic, which is from the era where you needed 3 people to fly the plane, the first two being the first officer (co pilot) and captain and the third being the flight engineer, who was responsible for monitoring the electrical, hydraulic and fuel systems of the plane.
For your purposes, the flight engineer’s panel and all those switches are now handled by computers, but it gives you a more mechanical or direct idea of what those computers are doing instead of having to learn how to operate a flight computer to work it out, but just know that job is now done by a computer which is operated by the panel between the two pilots, so that wipes a lot of what makes a cockpit look complicated.
As for the rest of it, look at the diagram and look up what the functions are if you don’t know it, but the easiest way I can kind of explain how it all actually functions during a flight, a flight being from the moment the plane is first switched on to the moment it’s powered down, kind of like how you start driving by entering the cabin and turning the ignition and stop driving by removing the key and exiting.
If I were it try to explain ‘what all those buttons do’ I’d be here all day (and I’d love every minute), hence the diagram, but the easiest way to think about it is this:
So your phone seems pretty simple, right? You’ve got all the apps, you use the apps, sometimes you might use some apps a whole lot, but other apps you might only use sometimes but when you do it’s important that you can, you have a keyboard that pops up when you need to type text but goes away when you don’t, and although you can use your phone to make calls, that uses this whole other system completely separate from the system that runs the YouTube or reddit app even though your phone treats it like another app?
Well, imagine that instead of the apps only being displayed one at a time and you interact with an operating system to access them, they were instead all open all the time, spread around on a desk with a bunch of little screens, and every function of the apps was also always open and on their own screen so you could access it immediately? Maybe you even had a separate keyboard for each app, and the toggle switches in the settings menu were actually physical switches that lit up when you pressed them?
Sounds pretty confusing right? Well, think about it, you know how to use all the apps on your phone and you may only need to use some of them in certain situations, meaning you can essentially ignore those apps on that desk and focus on the one or two apps you use all the time. That’s basically a cockpit. A bunch of ‘apps’, basically control modules, that instead of being in one big screen are instead spread about the cockpit, meaning that without having to lose your altimeter or gyroscope, you can just look over and adjust your fuel trim, adjust the autopilot heading, change frequencies to talk to different air traffic controllers, and then maybe hit the button that makes the ‘bing bong’ sound.
It also means that instead of a notification banner popping up, the thing you might need to adjust only occasionally is always able to be adjusted and has its own warning system, and if it’s important you, or more importantly your co pilot, can adjust it immediately without having to lose those other important features.
They make it look easy *because* of all the switches. Each one is a choice that a pilot can set and then not have to manage actively anymore
Tons of stuff from batteries to de-icing to comms/lights .. autopilot.. flight management computer. im not going to pretend to know it all but everything in there has an essential part to play
Think of it like this: the buttons are like shortcuts on your computer keyboard. You don’t need to use all of them all the time, but they’re crucial for specific scenarios and emergencies. Most of the time, pilots mainly use auto-pilot and a few key instruments. It’s not that they’re not doing anything, it’s just that a lot of the systems are automated to help with workload and safety.
There’s a lot of words in this thread to avoid explaining like OP is five years old.
When your car breaks, you pull over (if you can) and fix it, or you call a tow truck.
When your plane breaks, either you can fix it from where you’re sitting before you crash, or you can’t. You need **everything** within arm’s reach of the pilot.
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