Why do you need to press so many buttons to start a plane? Can’t there be just one button to start everything in sequence automatically?
In: Technology
There are two points to this. If you are thinking of an old 172 airplane the main reason is it’s from the 50s level technology. Sure improvements have been made but those carburetor piston engines need you to manually control fuel flow (more to do with airplanes encountering different air pressure at altitude which requires the fuel mix to be adjusted). Its old reliable technology but had a bit more human input.
New engines that have digital controls are mostly just push button start. A computer takes care of everything just like your new car. Might be 3 switches, battery then fuel pump on then flick the starter and boom engine running. Separate switches for these things to be able to isolate them in emergency or just because they are not always needed.
The rest of the time taken getting into the air is running checklists to ensure everything is running properly and if you are going IFR flying getting the clearance from ATC can also some time be a longer wait.
The aircraft can be in the air very quickly if you need to and skip the checks. For example when I was on a red alert stand by for fire fighting we had to be airborne in less than 5 minutes from getting the call. As we are waiting at the look out tower for 8 hours a day we clearly are not sitting strapped in all day waiting so some of that 5 mins is just getting in. To make sure the aircraft is ready I ran the full checklist at the start of the day and basically just did the bear minimum checklist to get into the air. Typically in around 45secs to a minute to have the helicopter cold to airborne. In this case I’m trusting my previous full checklist and the aircraft hasn’t been out of my sight all day. For less critical flying we do have turnaround checklists that ignore many items on the first start of the day checklist to get airborne quicker. Compared to flying IFR where more items are critical that they work so longer checklists I might be 10min on the ground before departing.
Part of it is the checklist aspect that others have mentioned. Also, it’s kind of like why high end cameras have tons of controls while your smartphone camera has very few and does most of the work for you. Cars, and smartphone cameras, are designed to be easy to use in most circumstances. They are highly automated because that makes them easy to use. The tradeoff is reduced control, which means that when you encounter one of the circumstances that the automated systems can’t handle well, you don’t have easy access to controls for the individual subsystems, AND you probably don’t understand them well enough to know what to change to make it work.
In a smartphone or car, that’s generally ok, because you can put the smartphone down, or pull your car off the road. On an airplane, it’s not ok. The pilot needs to be able to directly control many different systems at a moment’s notice in case something goes really wrong, and they have to be accustomed to directly controlling those systems, so that if they ever need to do it for real, it will come naturally to them. They might not have time to fidget.
So that’s the other part. Pilots need to be masters at controlling many different subsystems because a situation COULD occur where they need to assume direct control of one of those systems.
Case in point: the two recent disasters involving 737 MAX aircraft. There was an automatic system to handle keeping the aircraft’s angle of attack (how much its pointed up/down) at an optimal level, and the pilots weren’t trained in how to take direct control of that system, and didn’t have an easy way to bypass the automatic system (which malfunctioned) and assume direct control. Result.. two crashes, hundreds dead.
It’s not just planes, most computer systems, factory plants and vehicles which are not made for the end user are a lot more complicated to start, maintain running (flawlessly) and shut down then a car.
As an example I can talk a bit about my work in a candy factory. The plant to produce the candy slurry has an estimated learning time of 6 months, and then you’re barely qualified to start it and shut it down, if nothing unusual happens. The process from the point of powering the controls up (pressing the power on button, so to speak) until everything is set for regular use takes about an hour.
There’s a similar gap in user accessibility between home owned PCs and servers used for companies and specialized tasks.
I remember listening to an NPR story about this a while back. The pre-flight checklist (and the general idea of a checklist as we know it today) was invented by Boeing after two pilots died in a 1935 crash of a prototype plane in Dayton, Ohio. The system failure occurred because the pilots had forgotten to disengage the gust locks prior to takeoff, which are only supposed to be active while on the tarmac.
Basically, as others have said: even if a pilot thinks they know the switch is in the right position, the stakes are just too high to assume they are correct. Human error (or in the case of your original prompt: program error) is a thing, and hurtling through the air at 500mph isn’t something that should be taken lightly. Hence the double checking of every function on board to ensure safety.
Some good and really bad answers here. I’m an expert in process control, and to black and white answer your question, there is no technological reason why this is not possible today
There technology is currently in use across many processes and industries across the world, and relatively simple to program and still keep the pilot at the front of control.
On start up, the pilot would need to be retrained to observe a start up report in case of any anomalies and likely they would still 4 eye check that all systems are functional as intended.
Whether this should happen would be a purely human factors discussion. It could be argued that a less manual start up sequence may cause disengagement of pilots, but the counter argument would be that a program can do the task quicker and with magnitude lower errors. An interesting discussion anyway but from you question, yes it’s possible.
I am no plane expert, but imagine as a Pilot, suddenly your plane is showing one warning light, and you don’t have anything else except one start button
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