Engineering
Human Factors in Designing an Airplane Cockpit Display
Quick fact
A well-designed cockpit display can cut a pilot's reaction time to a warning by nearly half, and the difference between a good and bad display layout has been linked to real accident causes—like the 1977 Tenerife disaster and the 1997 SilkAir crash, where display design and pilot confusion played a role.
Why this is interesting
You're in the cockpit of a modern airliner, and the screens are filled with numbers, symbols, and colors. How do pilots find the one critical piece of information in a split second when every millisecond counts?