Human Factors in WW2 U.S. Fighters

I did a paper on human factors in Aerospace Engineering for my senior paper. One of the 3 professors who graded it HATED the idea that Engineering could be influenced by human factors. He scored my paper with the precise lowest score he could give without preventing me from graduating and slapped a comment on it that real Engineering is not impacted by human whims.

Another problem with no cockpit floor: Frank Tallman wrote about an aerobatics routine in a Corsair where everything either dropped or forgotten in the belly of the airplane fell into the canopy the first time he went inverted, including a half eaten apple, a half inch wrench, a copy of the pilot's handbook, and a dead mouse.

Kurt Tank, designer of the FW-190 series said "Everything for the pilot". Hence the excellent ergonomics. He also made his planes as easy as possible for ground crew to work on. There are sight guages in the wings to see fuel status, the engine can be removed with just 4 bolts and the list goes on. I guess when you have a very experienced/good aviator who is also a designer this what you get.

For human factors and general flyability, a look at the Blackburn Botha should be worthwhile. That immortal report: "Climbing into this aircraft is difficult. It ought to be made impossible."

As a truck driver I know that ergonomics have a huge factor to do with fatigue when you operate machinery for long hours and my favorite trucks to drive have been determined by the ergonomics of the cab switch and gauge layouts as well as foot well room shifter location ect

I heard on british airplanes like the Spitfire the cockpit layout was more of the chaos type, "oops, we have still another lever forgotten, where is a gap?" But the best for the "human factor" is in the Mosquito - a rubber tube with a funnel at the end for "excretive" resource management. And on the BMW 801-Fw 190s, I heard that a real change was that you just had one throttle lever, no mixture control you had to tune constantly. The fuel injection system had an outright mechanical computer with multiple parameters that were processed "automatically". I know, that will be handled in a future video anyhow ..

About 2 years ago there was an article in a British aviation magazine (The name escapes me.) by the chief test pilot at Grumman. During the war the navy had Grumman and Vought trade an F6F and a Corsair to improve each type. Grumman was to study the F4U to increase the power from the R-2800 and lighten the aileron forces in a roll. Vought was to study the F6F for ease of maintenance and to improve COCKPIT LAYOUT! Looks like Vought might have learned something from Grumman.

Many aircraft of this era had cockpit layouts that were "user hostile".

I was taught in college that human factors was recognized in WWII when they realized that the placement of the gauges in different positions on the training aircraft as they progressed to the ones that they would use in combat was causing accidents when under stress they reverted to what position they first learn and were using the wrong information. By standardizing the position of the critical gauges their eyes were in the cockpit for a shorter duration.

As someone who used to teach human physiology, I think your description of the inner ear problem was nicely done. Nothing inaccurate, but obviously very simplified. I remember a while back, I think it was the FAA had a simulator that rotated as an educational tool for this very issue. They demonstrated how the pilot was just fine until they had him or her lean their head forward quickly: instant disorientation.

Although not instrument related, I read an article on all of the different steps it took to switch a P-38 from cruise mode to be ready for combat. The point was that to took a significant amount of time to be ready to fight if the P-38 pilot suddenly saw an enemy plane closing on him and it was easy to miss a step. It involved dropping tanks, switching fuel source and changing the mixtures for the engines. In one of the interviews of a P-38 pilot, he noted that he had forgotten to properly switch to internal tanks and his engines died just before he shot down a German plane. The pilot joked that he was the only pilot to ever shoot down an enemy fighter from a glider.

Early on in this video you mentioned Diego Garcia. I've been there many times and the only time I've experienced vertigo was taking off from there on a cloudy night and we had to do an air turn back shortly after takeoff. I'm a flight mechanic so nothing drastic happened except I lost where we were at. So from that experience early on in my career I learned a valuable lesson. Keep your eyes on the instruments. Yes, your flight mechanic also watches flight instruments and engine indications, unless he's not very good at his job.

Just operating the engine of a WW2 era aircraft was crazy complicated and changed depending on your priorities, altitude, speed, need for long perm reliability, and other factors. Charles Lindberg was able to teach pilots to greatly economize their fuel usage (resulting in greater range) in the Pacific theater towards the end of WW2. In modern military aviation, a lot of attention is given to 'Cognitive Load'. Making it easy to do the right thing results in people doing the right thing more regularly.

P 38 cockpit layout would be interesting as well due to all long distance flying in the Pacific pilots had to do

Greg's method of scanning the instruments is pretty much the Old Spice meme. "I'm the attitude indicator. Now look at the altimeter now back to me. Now the VSI now back to me..."

I remember watching a documentary years ago about an RAF officer who was given the job of investigating accidents during WWII, and he said that there were twice as many planes lost to accidents as there were from enemy action.

I wish my father was still around to comment on this work. He started designing in the mid 1930s and saw a lot of this stuff. He had worked his way through Univ. of Ill by working the line in International Harvester factory and appreciated "thoughtful" design. In his early days he would come up with a design idea and then go on the line to show it to fabricatiors and mechanics to get feedback on how hard it would be to make and maintain things. He really enjoyed that team interaction and was not happy with the way things had changed by the time he retired.

American pilots were given a basic scan of "Needle, Ball, Airspeed" if they inadvertantly flew into cloud. It was the onset of mass mobilisation for war that prompted a huge increase in proper instrument flight training, because of the consequent soaring loss rate in training. Hence, every available flight school was enroled into the Flight training system and huge amounts of things like Link Trainers were built.

Someone at Republic saw this video. I understand the cockpit layout of the F-105 was considered to be one of the best for the time. In fact F-4 pilots preferred the Thud cockpit to the Phantom cockpit. The debate is just as skewed in favor of the Phantom in terms of flying characteristics. And I've heard it said the F-15 fixed this layout issue from pilots who converted to the Eagle. And they hadn't mentioned the Heads Up Display yet.

I've been waiting for a video about this in some form after you brought it up with the Fw 190 series about just how much better the 190 was laid out compared to it's contemporaries. It was a relatively subdued part of the video but it was something that I definitely thought merited a deeper look. The more I've learned about human factors with work (A&P) the more it's helped with finding the flow of things to make life easier, like how to set up the 787 cockpit for expedient maintenance.