Airbus 380 cockpit panorama!!

http://www.gillesvidal.com/blogpano/cockpit1.htm

Way cool!

Seems to want to yaw to the right all the time.

Also very easy to put into a flat spin.

Virtually no circuit breakers.

Not a real plane...it doesn't have a yoke just a joystick from a computer game

No circuit breakers 'cos you can't trust humans to reset things...computer knows best

Like the HUD though.

Back in the day when I taught HCI, the Airbus A320 was one of my "favourite" examples of how to design controls so that the pilot could get things very wrong, very fast - quoting the Strasbourg crash as an example. All too often the class would look horrified that such a thing could happen. Then one day a student revealed that his father had been one of the British test pilots on the A320, and he confirmed all that I had said. The pilot is really there to talk to the ATC people and turn a few knobs.
Two years ago I had a series of flights in A319 Airbuses (Virgin America) and sat there (as we flew over the Sierra Nevada range) thinking "I hope they have the Rate of Descent control sorted by now".
A case of "Sorry, squire, if you wanted to take your own pictures you should not have selected Program Mode" but in Macro.
geoff

it does have optional laptops for playing computer games during the flight though.

Excuse my naivety as I know nothing about flying planes, but the sides of the cockpit where presumably the pilot and co-pilot sit seem to be almost mirror images of eachother - so does one of them have to be right handed and one left handed?

The view on the middle of the three LCD screens (in the centre) should shut up the "external views are for noobs" fools who populate flight sim forums

Nope, just learn to use either hand. Think of the thread about R/L master eye and handedness. And - think about driving on r and L sides of road in R / L hand drive cars - that is a whole new can of worms (in terms of human cognition).
Geoff

It's no different to driving a left hand drive car as opposed to a right hand drive one your brain adapts pretty quickly

I won't trade my Cessna for that thing. At least, I'm the one flying the thing.

Takes about 30 minutes to adapt to the car in general, a bit longer to adapt to the position of the indicator (turn signal) stalk. Think about learning to quick-focus a lens clockwise or anti-clockwise. That's the easy bit.
Problem is (say) a driver from England - RH drive but drive on the left - getting into a local car in France (or the USA) which is LH drive and drive on the right. His/her brain will try to position him/her just to the left of the white line to the right hand side of the visual field. This is more likely to happen if the driver is getting tired. The danger, and it's a real danger, is that the rest of the vehicle is now about half a width over the white line, with two wheels very close to the edge. If they go off the edge, then the vehicle goes sharp right and down the bank.
That takes about two-three days to adapt. Can be overcome with concentration, but that is taking concentration from the rest of the road. This can also cause problens with the road markings on some roundabouts (traffic circles) in that (say) the driver from France (in England) will try to go to the right at a roundabout by following an inappropriate white line. This can lead to an accident - often in the first 24 hours in England.
Geoff

When a First Officer gets upgraded they have a number of sessions (4-6) in the simulator, and then normally about 20 flights under supervision (ie with a training captain in the right-hand seat), so they have plenty of time to adapt before they are let loose on their own with a co-pilot.

Only training captains get to do landings in both seats, and get checked in both seats in the simulator on their bi-annual check: for everyone else it's one or the other, depending on their position .

Have to say - if it really took those lengths of time to adapt, people would be crashing within 10 yards of leaving car rental agencies all over the world in their thousands every day. Which, clearly, there aren't, or there would be carnage and driving by ordinary people would be banned (maybe a good thing...)

In reality, accidents due to "wrong side" happen regardless of if the controls are on the left or the right, as you can see at Dover/Calais where people are still driving their own vehicle - its the question of which side of the road to drive on that confuse people, NOT the controls.

Also on cars, the vital controls are standardised - particularly accelerator & brake, and the stearing wheel still goes left for left and right for right... even indicators are more consistent than they used to be. So what's left - the gear stick? that's not something you can get wrong without serious lack of attention and if you use the wrong hand nothing will happen... the radio? well there's a good case for saying radios are highly dangerous distractions for a driver at the best of times...

Wrong thinking. A lot of people are concentrating too hard on the controls that they miss their turning leaving the rental agency. They do not crash because they are going very, very, slowly

Nope, sorry, its a cognitive/perceptual problem. In your own vehicle the problem is markedly reduced. We solved the problem of coming off a car ferry by simply having my wife say "Keep Right" or "Keep Left" and then getting into the appropriate lane to reset the brain.

Nope, yet again. Ever seen someone drive a Japanese car and put the wipers on instead of the turn signal? The two stalks alternated position for many years. remember that Japanese cars were built with RH Drive, and mostly sold into LH drive markets. The gear-shift? This is not standard on US cars even today. Even with auto-transmission, the shift can be on the floor, in the dash, and behind the wheel, and moving in different planes. And, that is a personal observation over seven days using cars in three different US cities.

You probably have many, many, thousands of miles behind you, and think about what you are doing - but a lot of people do not have the experience and don't think either.

A lot of the early Airbus crashes were caused by the provision of a control which could be miss-interpreted and miss-set. Specifically, the Rate-of-Descent control could be set to thousands of metres/min or to degrees, without any indication of which was being set. Three degrees is a normal descent glide-slope, three K-metres/min is a bit sudden if you are flying an approach over mountains That's why a guy at NASA-AMES in California started developing a software package to test the aircraft on-board software at the design stage to reduce such problems. As I recall, Boeing were very quick to take it up.
Geoff

This is fascinating stuff, Doctorjeff. What is HCI?

I think there is more to this including habit nothing to do with L or R side driving. We have two cars, a Mercedes-Benz and a Smart, the Mercedes direction selector (forward or reverse) is in the same position as the Smart's wiper switch and I get annoyed every time I select forward on the Smart and switch on the wipers by mistake.

Hiring a car in Europe I find when stressedusually through being temporarily lost I quite often forget that the hired manual car needs to have the clutch pedal depressed when slowing down.