Ergavionics: Designing the Job of Flying an Airplane

Ergavionic principles governing the design and operation of an airplane cockpit were discovered through simulator and flight experiments starting during World War II and continuing through the 1970s, but their systematic application has not happened. These principles deal with control location and operation, display integration and pictorial realism, and control/display direction-of-motion relationships. Systematic application of these principles would make the job of flying an airplane so much easier and safer that hundreds of lives would be saved every year, and in the decades to come, thousands of lives.