Airplanes have to deal with turbulence and I really would not want to change any critical settings on a touch screen while being bounced around, I remember when I still had the bloody touchscreen device in the car I mis-touched and I had no idea how to get back to where it was before, it took a stop at a gas station to reset the interface. In general I think the obsession with getting rid of knobs and buttons is a bad thing.
I'd love it if there was a general prohibition on touch screens in cars, I'm pretty sure that it is a safety issue. Any device that requires that you take your eyes of the road in a vehicle is a bad device.
... tries to tap the Shoot button, but the plane shakes. Eject button is tapped instead ...
"Fuck!"
Ejecting will render plane not usable, are you sure? [ Yes ] [ Cancel ]
... taps Cancel very carefully ...
You have chosen to Cancel the ejection process, but you don't have enough coins! [Purchase Coins] [Cancel and Eject]
Honestly, page-based systems that can be accessed with a castle/boat switch is fine for modern fighters and trained pilots. Hearing a trained Eagle driver rattle off how to get to a specific menu/page from any other page is pretty impressive- "You need to change missile mode but you're on the ECS page? Back, down, down, right, right. [or something like that]" And they aren't even sitting in the plane or looking at the screens, it's just muscle memory.
Non-military specific, and the biggest con of touchscreens in a cockpit: - Turbulence makes it hard to hit the right places on the touchscreen. Traditionally you'd rest your hand or stabilize a few fingers on the outside of your radio/navigator before twirling the dials or pushing buttons, and there was enough resistance to keep from accidental presses. With stuff like the GTN 650 pushing the screen out to the edges, resting your hand on the bezel means you accidentally make touches to the edge of the screen. Competitors like Avidyne actually market old school buttons as a feature, and it's a compelling one.
Military specific concerns: - Wearing gloves while flying means that button size needs to be huge and touchscreens aren't very precise. - High-G maneuvers make it really hard to touch the right part of the screen.
Reminds me of seeing cashiers operating ansi/tui POS without even looking because they had worked up the keyboard muscle memory.
Then came the touch UIs and it all seemed to go to hell.
Sitting here thinking about it, i wonder if what made it all work was that you used arrow keys to navigate the UI and then hit a specific button to activate the focused element.
With mouse/touch oriented UIs there is no concept of activating a element. They are all "hot".
a) As many critical controls as possible are already stuck on the stick and throttle. For an example (ok, technically from a game/simulator, but close enough), http://falcon4.wikidot.com/avionics:hotas .
b) The expectation is that fighter combat will continue to evolve to become ever more information dominant. That means having the ability to gather, process, and act on as many information as possible, and faster than the opponent. This means information rich displays that given today's limitations on HUDs and HMDs, still means the pilot will have to look down anyways to fully exploit their information.
So instead of comparing touchscreen controls to say... touchscreen controls for your radio in your car, consider if your job was to drive, while also like... playing an air traffic controller game or something.
Is fighter combat a thing ?
What was the last air to air ("dogfight") the US was involved in ? How frequent are they ?
I am in favor of optimization and looking ahead to future use but when you use wording like "fighter combat will continue to evolve" that makes it sound like a thing that is happening in the world and that we are getting feedback from ... is it ?
edit: That said, you could probably make a decent aviation touchscreen. The main issue with off-the-shelf screens is it's easy to brush the wrong thing. A screen that takes significant pressure to register a touch would probably be usable, and for all I know this system might do that.
I suppose with practice you could navigate a touchscreen without looking but I’m not even there with my phone.
Two famous examples, one WWII era plane had gear up crashes because pilots pulled the wrong lever up, until the engineers replaced the landing gear levers (right next to the throttles and mixtures) with stylized landing gear wheels. Another example was a nuclear power plant where all the primary coolant loops had the identical handles causing accidents until the ops replaced all of loop1 handles with coors beer tap handles, loop2 with bud tap handles, such that you'd instantly know if you're trying to drain loop2 and you're touching all bud levers except one coors tap, you're doing it wrong.
Needless to say in both cases management wanted engineers to cut the cutesy stuff out and damn the safety results all we need is more abusive harder training because professional appearance is far more important than measurable safety increases. That's why we'll be stuck with ever increasing touch screens, more pilot error accidents or distracted driver accidents are a feature not a bug to a certain mindset that just wants to yell at and blame humans for being human.
And in turbulence and/or at night, or heavy workloads, it's even more handy.
About the only replacement I can imagine being better is the Firefox (film/novel) interface. I'd even learn Russian just to have that interface. You must think in Russian.
As far as situational aware, you're going to be looking away from the windscreen no matter what. Touchscreen v. tactile doesn't change that at all. Personally, touchscreen like the 650 is more intuitive to me than something tactile like a G1000, but the G1000 is also cramming a lot more info onto the screen. I just never liked reassigning unlabeled buttons to do something on the screen, it makes developing muscle memory harder (for me).
Without fail, I wait and wait and almost always hit a bump right when I go in for the button press.
The manual shift lever and physical dials for the air-conditioning are 100% reliable, by contrast.
It's also a way to buy closer relationship with the US.
I'd feel a lot worse about any other country spending money on potentially needless arms; Qatar is solidly in the "we have extra money" range as a government.
In 2017, Qatar and Saudi Arabia had a major falling out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%80%9318_Qatar_diplomat...
SA demanded that Qatar shutdown Al-Jazeera and all other news orgs, break off relations with Iran, pay unspecified piles of money that SA got to determine, and "align itself with the other Gulf and Arab countries militarily, politically, socially and economically, as well as on economic matters...".
SA and neighboring countries then closed the land border, and stopped allowing ships to unload cargo and transfer to smaller ships for delivery to Qatar. This affected almost all cargo headed into the country, since Qatar's port can't support large ships.
The neighboring countries also announced that anyone who shows sympathy to Qatar "whether it be through the means of social media, or any type of written, visual or verbal form", would be subject to $130,000 fine and three to fifteen years in jail.
And that's where things have been for the last nine months.
--
(Qatar, Iran, and SA all fund terrorism and terrorist organizations. There are all busy playing the Middle East version of the game of thrones. Any sympathy I feel for Qatar is because they are one of the little guys in this fight.)
Another strategy popularized by Iran and their F-14 collection would be realistically only a fraction will remain operational over time due to maintenance and parts logistics limitations such that in 20 years they'd like to be able to field, perhaps, 16 actual flyable aircraft, which is realistic for a small state, a couple CAP, a couple hot standby, a couple for training, maybe the occasional very small raid, 16 or so is about right. As a side note about Iran's F14 collection IIRC the Iraqis claimed in hundreds of press releases, added up over the entire Iran-Iraq war, to have shot down more Iranian F14s than the USA had delivered to Iran... so giving Qatar 72 planes means at least 140 or so claimed kills by someone, eventually, LOL. And we also sell ADA missile systems and A-to-A missiles so 140 claimed kills is good for business.
Both are valid
Qatar has always had a weird diplomatic position for an Arab state.
Qatar seems to have good diplomatic relations with that country, since the 90s
And is a close US ally, and hosts the Taliban's exiled leadership.
And is a GCC member, and maintains friendly ties with Iran. (Though the KSA has lost patience with that lately.)
Qatar excels at playing both sides.
