Comment by justsid
1 day ago
But the 787 doesn’t have an easily confused layout like that. The landing gear lever and fuel cut off switches are not two stalks on the yoke. Aircraft cockpits are deliberately designed in such a way that important things have differently shaped actuators that feel different from each other. Precisely so that you are not accidentally flipping the wrong switch by accident.
Actually the birth of Human Factors was related to this... Alphonse Chapanis, a psychologist working at the Army Air Force Aero Medical Lab in 1942, investigated the issue and discovered a design flaw. He observed that the controls for the flaps and the landing gear in the B-17 cockpit were nearly identical and located close to each other.