Not long ago I read a tragic story of an F-18 crash in Virginia Beach. Navy instructor and student pilot of an F-18 fighter jet had a catastrophic failure, forced to dump all their fuel and eject. The plane crashed into an apartment building. There were eight people injured on the ground, although not seriously, and fortunately no one died. Of course, the taxpayers lost a very expensive plane and the apartment complex burned down. Okay, considering this event, I have a few thoughts that came to my mind about future technologies.
Perhaps you are aware of the common cockpit theory which states that all aircraft should be configured similarly, therefore a pilot can go from one aircraft to another and know where everything is without having to relearn the aircraft. . It would be much like a laptop where all the specific keys on the keyboard were all the same. Or get out of your car and into a Rent-A-Car, and all the controls were the same, so you knew where the horn was, the windshield wipers, the parking brake, and you could reach anything without looking. You can understand the safety factor involved here and how this would increase safety in all aspects.
Now consider whether you will if that Navy training flight never happened. Rather, what if that student had been flying the simulator instead of the plane itself? Simulators are getting more and more real these days, so it really wouldn’t have mattered, they could have received most of their instruction while on the ground in a very real VR environment, not to mention the cost savings of fuel. That makes sense, right? If the student pilot had flown a Cessna, Beechcraft, or Piper, all of those planes would have had similar cockpits with everything basically all in the same place, or at least as close as possible if common cockpit standardization ever comes to fruition. term: that would be good right?
Still, it costs a lot of money to have common cabins and get every aircraft manufacturer to build everything exactly the same way. Not to mention that planes will soon be built in China and other nations as well. Getting everyone on the same page with so much standardization is a very difficult task. However, it is a noble concept and a wise decision. Now, reasoning all this out, I wonder if it’s worth doing for military aircraft because in the future, as more and more UAVs or unmanned aerial vehicles are built, humans may not fly many planes in the army in the future anyway. .
In fact, maybe we could consider the costs of upgrades and standardization when everything is about to change anyway. Or we may realize that many of these UAV platforms could one day include a human pilot module, in which case the connection ports for that peripheral would indeed need complete standardization. Please consider all this and think about it.
