wrote in message
ups.com...
....

You'll get used to it... there is a transition time to go from round
dial to tapes, but once you get used to tapes you will find that they
do have certain advantages. I worked on the 777 EFIS, which used the
tape format, and after several hours in the 777 simulator, the tapes
became as easy to read at a glance as the round dials. It just takes
conditioning your mind to be able to rapidly scan them, and being able
to pick up trend information from the tape motion instead of needle
motion. At least that was my experience.

A lot of human factors work went into the tape formats, and it was
with the understanding that training would be required for pilots to
adapt to them.

Dean


Hey Dean, the tape systems I've seen have the scale fixed on the display and
the tape that moves up and down the scale appropriately. That is not how the
Garmin system works from what I've seen. The G1000 in the local 182 actually
moves the scale in relation to a fixed pointer that is mid-scale on the
display, so you have to read numbers relative to a pointer instead of
judging a tape marker relative to a fixed scale. This is much more difficult
than the old fixed scale displays, but I don't see how they could cram as
much on the screen as they do if they still used fixed scale depictions.
Those old instruments used the barberpole concept very well and went right
along with the round gages for system monitoring where we would rotate the
gauges in the panel such that "normal" had all needles pointing the same
direction; no interpretation needed unless one of the needles wasn't
pointing like the rest.

In some ways technology has made the panel much less intuitive and more time
consuming. Think about traffic signals - Red means stop, but we could have
just as easily put up a digital display that said "Cross traffic beginning".
Which would be easier for the driver to interpret most quickly?



--
Jim Carter
Rogers, Arkansas