From: "Marvin Kaye" <marv@lancaironline.net>
Subject: Re: [LML] Of Men and EFIS
To: lml
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 14:34:23 -0400
Message-ID: <web-2635363@logan.com>
In-Reply-To: <65.1abab368.2cbc3bd3@aol.com>
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Posted for Epijk@aol.com:

Brent:

Although I never got this impression from you personally, I'm amazed at the 
energy you have for tilting at windmills.

The well-developed logic and reasoning presented in your post will likely 
have little or no effect on the hordes of graduates from the engineering 
school at Perpetual Motion University. But thanks for the work anyway 
(filed in my "Engineering Jewelry" directory).

BTW, is there a significant dearth of controversy in your life these days??  
(...irrational desire and a willingness to lay aside logic and critical 
thinking. No wonder airplanes are traditionally identified as female since 
they stimulate those same, ancient neural pathways....)

I forgot to disagree with one of your points, to wit:

".......All this mental gymnastics  {steam gauge IFR environment the pilot 
takes abstract symbolic information (needles and numbers)} consumes a 
significant portion of your available brain power..."

Yes, but only in the beginning. When you get competent at IFR on the steam 
gauges, it becomes another "second nature" and doesn't consume nearly so much 
processor bandwidth, as evidenced by the intentional and manifest distractions 
with which the IFR applicant must deal competently on the checkride in order 
to gain the ticket. If you stay competent (not "current"), the whole EFIS 
issue 
becomes a solution in search of a problem.

I'm quite happy to trundle along with ILS/ VOR/ DME/ NDB equipment, and was 
very happy with that level of equipment during several hundred hours of 
"hard IFR" including 50 or so in a Glasair-3.  The gruesome, inconsistent
user-interfaces of the LORAN/GPS products I had the misfortune to 
encouter convinced me that, for my circumstances (Part-135), I'm quite 
content with the old stuff.

Jack Kane