Fly by.... joystick?

I managed to dig up a reasonably well sized image of the Airbus A380 cockpit today. Well, managed is probably the wrong word; Wikipedia pointed me in the right direction. At any rate, here for your enjoyment is the A380 cockpit. Notable features include the QWERTY keyboard for interfacing with the flight computer, LCD display screens, ethernet communication for the plane's components (not visible, but very much there!), and my favourite: the joysticks. Pilots naturally call them side-sticks to sound more professional, but we all know what they are.

Fly-by-wire (the technology which affords the humble joystick a place in a cockpit) is a technology that abstracts the pilot's control of the airplane from a mechanical to an electrical interface. Instead of pulling and pushing the control surfaces manually (or with the aid of hydraulics), the pilot is now sending electrical signals to servo systems. In theory, it is a technology that has been possible for as long as electrical engineers have had reasonably accurate means of measuring and setting angular position on a servo. It is certainly not a new idea, but it is one that has been slow in adoption. Its advantages include ease of use, reduced weight, modular implementation, and modular replacement.

For all the advantages of fly-by-wire, it has one glaring disadvantage: warm fuzzies. Most of us realize that electricity is sometimes less reliable than physical control in the domain of our homes and appliances. Whether this is true or not in an airplane, we extend this belief to the airplane, and we avoid boarding just because we don't have the warm fuzzy happy feeling evoked by knowing that a competent pilot has final physical control over the airplane. So strong is this feeling that airplane manufacturers have been loathed to use it on a grand scale. Even those airplanes which currently use it do so with an interface indistinguishable from more primitive airplanes.

Like it or not, the A380 is using the joystick as its fly-by-wire interface. It is in production, and the first one was delivered this week. If you are one of the many passengers who relied on the warm fuzzy feeling of physical control, you may need to supplement your flight with something else warm and fuzzy. May I suggest a teddy bear?