Bell X-1 Rocket Engine

[MIflyer]

From Av Week, Jan 1947

 

[MiTasol]

Nice one - do you have the rest of the article on cockpit design? It has always been an item of interest to me as so many early (pre 1960) accidents are related to that subject and there are still modern accidents caused by it tho much rarer.

 

[MIflyer]

No, I do not have that one. You can go to Archive.org and look for it. I did a masters paper on cockpit design for a course in human factors, so I know what you mean.

A few years back there was a Cessna 182 that flew from GA to NC and along the way they quit talking to ATC. They overflew any number of perfectly good controlled airports and then tried to land at an uncontrolled field in gathering darkness and bad weather, crashed, and both people on board died.

The conclusion was that the 182 used the same audio panel as the larger Cessna twins. There was a switch position to switch from headsets to cabin speaker, but the 182 has no cabin speaker, so throwing the switch in that position made it impossible to hear the radios. Unable to communicate, they tried to only land at uncontrolled fields. While anyone would be stupid enough to put a switch position that essentially shuts off the audio output from the radios and not label it as such is beyond me.

 

[MiTasol]

No, I do not have that one. You can go to Archive.org and look for it. I did a masters paper on cockpit design for a course in human factors, so I know what you mean.

A few years back there was a Cessna 182 that flew from GA to NC and along the way they quit talking to ATC. They overflew any number of perfectly good controlled airports and then tried to land at an uncontrolled field in gathering darkness and bad weather, crashed, and both people on board died.

The conclusion was that the 182 used the same audio panel as the larger Cessna twins. There was a switch position to switch from headsets to cabin speaker, but the 182 has no cabin speaker, so throwing the switch in that position made it impossible to hear the radios. Unable to communicate, they tried to only land at uncontrolled fields. While anyone would be stupid enough to put a switch position that essentially shuts off the audio output from the radios and not label it as such is beyond me.

Yep - blindingly obvious in hindsight like the early fuel dumps that did not have a standpipe that limited how much you could dump until an idiot captain refused to listen to his flight engineer and ran out of fuel and killed a lot of his pax. Or the airliners that had one push button on the autopilot that selected both rate of decent and angle of decent (for one you push half way down and the other the full way down) and caused a bunch of accidents when the crew thought they selected say 4 degrees but actually selected 4,000 fpm descent. When the ground prox went off at 1,000 ft they had not enough time to slam the power levers and get the aircraft climbing before they hit the ground. Or the Alpha floor, etc, etc.

Fortunately as an industry we try and learn from each others mistakes tho some airlines still think they know better than anyone else - including the aircraft manufacturers.

 

[AMCKen]

No, I do not have that one. You can go to Archive.org and look for it. I did a masters paper on cockpit design for a course in human factors, so I know what you mean.

A few years back there was a Cessna 182 that flew from GA to NC and along the way they quit talking to ATC. They overflew any number of perfectly good controlled airports and then tried to land at an uncontrolled field in gathering darkness and bad weather, crashed, and both people on board died.

The conclusion was that the 182 used the same audio panel as the larger Cessna twins. There was a switch position to switch from headsets to cabin speaker, but the 182 has no cabin speaker, so throwing the switch in that position made it impossible to hear the radios. Unable to communicate, they tried to only land at uncontrolled fields. While anyone would be stupid enough to put a switch position that essentially shuts off the audio output from the radios and not label it as such is beyond me.

Many years ago in a Cessna 150 I was changing radio frequencies at the same moment I hit a little turbulance. After that I couldn't hear the tower. Seems I had bumped the volume knob down to zero while doing the change. Took a few moments to figure that one out.