What do all the controls in an airplane cockpit do?
A seemingly innocuous question: What do all the controls in an airplane cockpit do? When he saw this question posted to Quora, pilot Tim Morgan posted a 9000-word essay on how modern airplanes work, including, yes, what all those little cockpit dials and knobs do.
Every airplane is different. Unlike learning to drive a car, you can’t just hop from one plane to another. A pilot needs familiarization (and in some cases, a whole new type of license) to fly a different kind of plane. Some are piston-powered; some are jet-powered. Some have electrically-driven controls; some are hydraulically-driven. Some have emergency oxygen; some don’t. And so on. All the switches, dials, and knobs in the cockpit control the various aircraft systems, and every aircraft has different systems.
Megan Garber wrote a behind-the-scenes piece about Morgan’s answer for The Atlantic.
Morgan says, “I took the time to go over it again and verify that everything was correct. I used an operations manual from a 737 simulator to check my facts.” And “in the end it was a very personally rewarding experience, because I had had the operations manual lying around and had been meaning to really study it, and now I finally had my excuse.”
So answering the Quora question was as much about learning as it was about sharing. And as for Morgan’s overall motivation? “I can tell you with certainty that it is related to my pathological interest in aircraft,” he says, “and in general a love to write and share knowledge.”
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