A friend and I were talking about planes again and I pondered the question of what was the most advanced aircraft with a traditional dial-based cockpit. I originally meant a fighter jet or some other military plane, but the true answer soon became obvious.
It’s the fucking space shuttle and its 2,214 controls…
NASA updated the original cockpit to a glass cockpit in 2000, significantly reducing the overall weight of the cockpit while reducing the total number of cockpit elements. Most of the important flight information was now concentrated in nine LCD monitors. They would fly with these until their respective retirements (or in Columbia’s case, destruction).
There were, however, still a mind-numbing number of cockpit elements even after the upgrade.