![]() “The F-22 prototype, the YF-22, had finger-on-glass controls as well,” Beesley notes. Beesley was the fourth pilot to fly the YF-22 and second pilot to fly the F-22. As a veteran of advanced aircraft development programs, he served as a US Air Force test pilot on the F-117 stealth fighter and as a General Dynamics test pilot for the YF-22. “Those displays represent a significant step toward the F-35 cockpit’s spare ambience and a departure from its steam-gauge predecessors,” notes Jon Beesley, the chief test pilot for the F-35. Similarly, the cockpit of the F-22 Raptor offers a trio of glass displays. A few switches still sprout here and there, but the overall cockpit ambience is one of simplicity and calm, almost to the point of aeronautical feng shui. The forest of toggle switches in previous fighter cockpits has been wiped clean from the F-35’s interior landscape, with most of their functions moved to the touch screen. In their place are large liquid-crystal touch-screen displays featuring color-coded symbology, pictographs, and digital information.Ĭhanging the displays is only a matter of pressing a finger on different parts of the screen of the multi-function display, or MFD, to reconfigure or prioritize information or activate systems. Gone are the analog steam gauge dials that populated the control panels of previous generations of fighter aircraft. What is not there is what is most evident to pilots the first time they see the F-35 cockpit. Nowhere are the advances in this multirole combat fighter more starkly illustrated than in the cockpit. With stealth, fully integrated avionics, advanced sensor fusion, and a dizzying array of interoperability and data-exchange requirements, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter represents more revolution than evolution. ![]()
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