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Human Interface: What (almost) every button in an F-15C fighter’s cockpit does



 
 
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Old July 5th 20, 05:20 AM posted to alt.binaries.pictures.aviation
Miloch
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Default Human Interface: What (almost) every button in an F-15C fighter’s cockpit does

https://arstechnica.com/features/202...r-jet-cockpit/

video worth the watch --- https://youtu.be/zikI2fazPLo

Welcome to the pilot episode of "Human Interface," a new series we're kicking
off wherein we take you up close and personal with complex systems and have an
expert explain what all the buttons and switches do. "Pilot episode" is
particularly appropriate here, because we're kicking off the series with a look
at a McDonnell Douglas F-15C Eagle, one of the world's most famous air
superiority fighters. The F-15C and its variants are in service with multiple
air forces around the world, including the United States, Japan, and Israel, and
the aircraft has an outstanding combat record—across all its deployments and
operators, air-superiority F-15s like the F-15C have racked up more than 100
air-to-air kills and zero losses.

Before the coronavirus made everything crazy, we were able to score some time
with an F-15C on the flight line at Fresno Air National Guard Base in
California. Our tour guide was Air Force pilot Colonel Andrea Themely, who
retired in 2018 after serving for 23 years. Col. Themely has about 3,400 hours
piloting high-performance jet fighters and about 1,100 hours specifically in
F-15Cs, and her last post was commanding the Air Force's 80th Flying Training
Wing.

Buttons, buttons everywhere...

As I found out firsthand a few years ago in the Navy's F/A-18 simulator at NAS
Oceana, a fourth-generation jet fighter like the F-15C is typically equipped
with a mish-mash of '70s- and '80s-era screens and buttons, with other more
current-looking '00s-era controls shoehorned into the corners. This reflects the
fact that fighters like the F-15C and its contemporaries are mostly products of
the 1970s, with more modern improvements bolted on over time.

Our California ANG F-15C is no exception, and Col. Themely spends a lot of the
video explaining the physical controls in the cockpit—switches and levers that
actuate functions that on a more modern fifth-generation fighter might instead
be primarily accessed via touchscreen.

The amount of controls to address might appear overwhelming, but there's a
secret to aircraft cockpits—you tend to only care about a few things at any
given moment, so once you're familiar with the instruments, you focus on what
you need and ignore the rest. It's the exact same thing people do when driving a
car or operating any complex piece of machinery.

For our next trick

We're really excited about the possibilities of "Human Interface" as a series,
and we have many more cool machines we'd like to see explained like this.
Airliners, submarines, huge earth moving machines, power plants, giant
car-eating dinosaur monster trucks—we've got a long list of stuff we're trying
to get in to see, and if you have any suggestions, please feel free to leave
them in the comments.

My personal bucket list item for the series would be to have some Apollo-era
flight controllers walk us through NASA's restored Mission Operations Control
Room 2 in Houston, but since its multi-million dollar restoration, NASA has been
reticent to allow any filming on the floor of MOCR2. We'll definitely keep
asking!




*


 




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