Video Gaming in Airline Cockpits

I have a theory about one of the main causes of some of the airline crashes and collisions which recur fairly frequently these days.

I was amazed and appalled to see during the television coverage of the aftermath of one such airline disaster that the visual technology used by pilots in the cockpit at the front of the plane is less sophisticated than that now available to passengers on many airlines.

The cockpit area where the pilot sits contains a lot of buttons, plus of course the front windscreen. What shocked me was that the geography, territory and other flying objects were depicted on the pilot's screens using just lines and dots.

Meanwhile, in business class, passengers are enjoying playing a flight simulator on their 32 or 64 bit games machines. For example, the Nintendo 64 has a reality engine with processors for texture maps, video and audio.

Dots and lines similar to those available 25 years ago in the first computer games may be fine for understanding what's going on in routine circumstances, but increasingly in the unorganized world events are random, novel and unexpected.

Unless pilots can gain a realistic and immediate visual overview of the relationship between the plane and its environment, how can they be expected to empathize, i.e. connect to their surroundings and decide in real-time about the level of criticality associated with non-routine events such as oncoming planes in collision course and react accordingly in a timely manner.

We need to bring some of the underlying technologies available at the back of the plane up front in the pilot areas. Yes, lets kit out the airplane pilots with games consoles and joysticks and try to avoid some of the cock-ups in the cockpits.

Author: Simon Buckingham

What do you think?

To make a comment to the author, send e-mail to simon@unorgan.com

 

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