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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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.
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