Quote Originally Posted by Floatsflyer View Post
Thanks for bringing this up, I forgot that part. Too many sequences, too many functions, too many places on the panels to know what you want when you want them and oh ya, you gotta fly the airplane at the same time. Like an IFR rating, you've got to keep current with this stuff. And it's too easy to forget to look outside to see and be seen.
I think many of the companies don't understand how necessary it is for a separate user interface test group. After you've been working six months to develop a new device, what you understand as a "simple, logical, flow" for the user interface is tainted by your in-depth knowledge.

Apple and the Android folks know that half their customers are going to be of below-average intelligence, and seem to work to simplify things as much as possible. I wonder if the avionics manufacturers are taking too much for granted.

A while back, we built a run of satellites and put some into cold storage. It was assumed that, at some point in the future, the government would want to launch a replacement. It was ALSO assumed that all the experienced people would be on other programs or retired when that happened.

I wrote the "wake up" procedures to what I thought was the "lowest level of understanding." Then we brought in another engineer with zero experience on the program, gave him the procedures, and told him to go ahead. Ended up doing a lot of revisions on that manual....

Ron "The eight-pin plug goes into the EIGHT-pin jack" Wanttaja