The idea behind avionics is that they should do what we want them to do without causing undo hassle or requiring too much attention on our part, attention we should be giving to flying the airplane. It’s like Facebook, the remarkably successful website that has attracted hundreds of millions of followers by giving them what they want, a simple, easy way to stay in touch with their friends and family. When people complain about Facebook, it’s either that it’s trying to do something apart from that main mission or that some feature is too complicated to use. When it comes to technology, the new lesson is that “complicated” is bad.
We’re finally getting that lesson in aviation. There’s been a trend these past 10 or 15 years among avionics manufacturers to make their products easier and easier to use. The movement has its roots in the world of computers, which is as it should be; today’s avionics are merely specialized computer systems, many of them running subsets of commercial off-the-shelf operating systems. If you want to understand “easy,” think iPad. Apple’s megapopular tablet wasn’t the first such product by a long shot. It was just the easiest and most satisfying to use.
