"Ramapriya" wrote in message
oups.com...
Wanted to ask how easy or natural it gets for pilots to perceive
aircraft positions and movements without actually looking at the
respective indicators.

I've been in the flight deck only once, and confess that I had very
little physical sensation to give me an idea of the 0.7 Mach or
whatever that the A320's airspeed indicator was showing. In fact, at
the end of the journey, there was little to suggest the speeds we were
actually traveling at.

A fundamental consequence of Newtonian mechanics is that it's physically
impossible to perceive velocity per se; velocity has no direct influence on
you. You can perceive *acceleration*, but not velocity.

Therefore, any perception of velocity has to be indirect. For instance, you
can look out the window, or use a GPS. Or the plane's velocity relative to
the air can be perceived by the airspeed indicator, because of the
interaction between the plane and the relative wind. Inside the cockpit,
though, you're insulated from the wind, so your only perception of it might
be by virtue of the sound it makes (or, if you're manipulating the controls,
then the response you get is another reflection of the plane's interaction
with the air, from which you can deduce something about airspeed). Also, as
in a car or train, the small accelerations you feel when the vehicle
encounters irregularities in its surroundings may be sharper or more rapid
at higher speeds, making the velocity indirectly perceptible.

Also, nearly throughout the 4-hour flight, the
heading was different from the direction of travel, but I didn't feel
that wind correction angle.

A constant crosswind is a component of velocity, not acceleration, so again
it is physically impossible for you to perceive it directly. You have to
look out the window or whatever.

--Gary