Re: Open Source Leaving Microsoft Sitting on the Fence? Very Long.

From: Jean-David Beyer (jdbeyer_at_exit109.com)
Date: 07/26/04 

Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 21:04:07 -0400

ynotssor wrote:
> "Jean-David Beyer" <jdbeyer@exit109.com> wrote in message
> news:10g81ggl610r2f5@corp.supernews.com
>
>
>>So do not blame the rental vehicle driver for neglect of rational
>>design of automobile control systems.
>
>
> To know the location of controls such as the pedals, steering wheel, lights
> etc. is the responsibility of the driver, and I've rented vehicles in many
> countries.
>
> Because the cars I rented in Kenya and Australia had a right-hand drive and
> different locations for the turn signals, headlights, wipers and
> transmission than the car I rent in Phoenix or Orlando, and is driven on
> opposite sides of the road in those 2 locations, are you really suggesting
> that the manufacturers have "neglect of rational design"?
>
> Or would you say that the driver of such a vehicle has the responsibility to
> familiarize themself with the location of such controls and their operation,
> before leaving the rental car lot and getting into traffic?
>
> Your suggestion of standardized locations of aircraft controls is absurd
> bull***. Pilots are type-rated for specific aircraft (and I spend many,
> many thousands of hours in private aircraft), and different aircraft have
> different equipment making such a standardized location absolutely
> impossible.
>
> Maybe you should spout such nonsense in an aircraft newsgroup and see the
> kind of responses you get.
>
The Italians and the rest of the world designed their race cars
differently. This was in the days when race cars had manual transmissions.

On most race cars, the pedals are layed out like American manual
transmission cars, with the clutch on the left, the brake in the middle,
and the accelerator on the right. There is a very good reason to do that
for inexperienced drivers of passenger cars.

The Italians made their race cars with the clutch on the left, the
accelerator in the middle, and the brake on the right. There is a very
good reason to do this.

Now obviously it is important to know what the layout of the controls are
when driving a race car, and experienced race drivers normally do know this.

One day an extremely experienced race car driver (Sterling Moss) was asked
to check out a Ferrari that its driver was having trouble with. Now Moss
normally drove English or German race cars, but he knew the pedal layout
of the Ferrari. He had no problems until an emergency situation came up
and by reflex, he hit the gas instead of the brakes. Now if safety were
the main objective in designing race cars, the Italian pedal layout would
have been abandonned long before this happened.

Now in his paper, "Parallels Between Aviation and Automotive Safety
Research", discusses a lot of this. Its author, William I. Stieglitz, was
one of the winners, in 1952, of the Aviation Week & Space Technology
Distinguished Service Award, so he can be considered to know something
about aircraft design.

Let me provide a few quotes from his paper.
                         
"I want to talk primarily today of what we have learned in aviation
safety, what our approach has been to many of these problems, the
parallels that I think can be drawn, and the benefits that can accrue to
automotive safety from the experiences in the aviation field. It has been
an over-all program involving the designer and the operator; it has
affected personnel training, it has affected operations, and it has hit
design and hit it hard, starting from the initial design. To indicate just
how effective this program has been: in the 11-year period from 1951 to
1960 [this is a paper presented in 1961 or so] we saw fighter airplanes in
the Air Force complete the transition from reciprocating engines to jets,
go from straight wing subsonic jet to the transonic jet to the Mach 2 Plus
fighter. In this same period the major accident rate has decreased by 85
percent, and the fatal accident rate has decreased over 50 percent. This
is in spite of the advances, in spite of the additional demands imposed by
the present-day airplane as compared to the airplane of 11 years ago.

"I offer this merely as evidence that a concerted over-all safety program
_can_ produce results. But it involves everybody, and it has to start from
the first concepts of design. ..."

...

"In the crash field, I'd like to point out that I know that crash
protection can be achieved. We started out at Republic [Aviation] in 1944
and produced the first airplane in the world with a 40-G seat installation
in the cockpit. We were told we were crazy. I had representatives of other
manufacturers saying, 'What kind of bunk is this? You know nobody can put
in a seat that strong.' But we had done it. And, incidentally, the total
cost of that, in redesign, was a penalty of 2 1/2 pounds in the weight of
the airplane in going from 12- to 40G protection.

"Now I want to show a couple of pictures of one case to prove my point and
also to challenge something that was said this morning that in most
accidents -- or in too many accidents -- any evidence of possible
condition is obscured in the wreckage. May I have the first slide please.

"This is a picture of a crash of a fighter airplane. That airplane,
incidentally, went off the end of the runway, barely airborne, at about
170 knots, flew for about 1200 feet, hit the ground, skidded for about 500
feet and then, nose first, went into a 6-foot earth embankment. It
cartwheeled and disintegrated. The next picture shows the general
wreckage. And the next picture shows the cockpit structure. The pilot
crawled out by himself before the crash crew got there. There was a fire
-- his flying suit was on fire -- and he rolled on the ground to put out
the fire on his flying suit. He was sitting on the ground watching the
rest of the wreckage burn when the crash crews arrived. His total physical
injury, aside from burns, consisted of a cut little finger. Our
investigation did not reveal how he cut his finger. But in this mess we
did find the control malfunction that caused the accident. It can be done.

"However, I bring this up to show what can be accomplished and,
incidentally, the only restraining devices this man had was a standard lap
seat belt and shoulder harness. If you look at this carefully, you'll see
that the plane is sheared off right down the front wall of the cockpit and
nearly all of the structure from the floor down was gone. The cockpit
remained intact as a box. The man was restrained in it and he crawled out.
After he recovered from burns he was back on flying status in about two to
three months. He is still flying.

"I claim that if an airplane can hit an earth embankment, moving at a
speed of something of the order of 150 knowts, and a man can get out of it
with a cut little finger, then it is possible to design automobiles so
that in a 30- or 40-mile-an-hour impact all the passengers can survive...

...

"Now I want to go on from here to another phase of accident prevention, an
area that hasn't been talked about very much today. We learned long ago in
aviation that far too many so-called pilot-error accidents were built into
the aircraft waiting for the pilot to make the error. They were design
induced. And I claim that today from what we know in airplane design,
there are far too many built-in operator-errors in the present automobile;
that we cannot say that 85 percent of the accidents are caused by the
driver, therefore we don't have to worry about the machine, let's educate
the driver. Somebody wrote a paper -- an Air Force officer -- several
years ago with the title 'Let's Get off the Pilot's Back.' I think it's a
good point. I think that maybe we should do here is say, 'Let's get off
the driver's back.' Let's start looking at what we are doing in the
automobile to induce driver error.

...

"We also have learned in airplanes that over and over again we had pilot
error from confusion between controls. We found there were two remedies --
the research on this was done in 1944 to 1947 -- that the vital, the
important thing, is, first, standardization of location of controls and,
second, shape-coding of knobs. This has been tested over and over and over
again -- to develop knob shapes that can be identified by feel
blindfolded. We don't use them in automobiles. We come out with slogans on
the radio: 'Never take your eye off the road for a minute,' and then we
give the driver a car in which we defy him to turn on a windshield wiper,
turn on his lights, turn on a heater or a defroster, without taking his
eye off the road to look and find the controls. He cannot tell them by feel.

"I saw an accident just a few weeks ago that was very interesting to me. I
was riding in traffic in the right-hand seat of a car. A woman was driving
  in front of us and I was looking through the back window of her car. She
was steering with her left hand. With her eye on the road, she reached
down and she fumbled on the seat for a few minutes and then came up with a
package of cigarettes. Without looking, she got a cigarette out of the
package with her one hand and put it into her mouth. She had identified
her handbag by feel: she managed to open it, she found the cigarettes, she
got the cigarette out and put it in her mouth. And then, to use the
lighter on the instrument panel, she looked down -- and the car in front
of her stopped and she piled into the rear of it. Driver error? Driver or
design error? Who made the first mistake that time?"

...

"The automobile industry, after years and years and years, finally 30
years ago got complete standardization on a manual shift, and they turned
around and went to automatic transmissions. And we've got two different
sequences of shift on the lever control, and on push-button controls I've
seen at least three different arrangements of the push buttons. You go
from one car to another and you're in trouble, because the human being is
a creature of habit. He does what he's used to doing and,
_particularly in an emergency or under stress_, he reverts to the oldest,
strongest habit pattern. A person who is used to driving a car that has
reverse all the way down at the far right, all the way over, gets into a
car which has low over there and reverse on the left and, without
thinking, the first thing he does is pull the lever over to the right if
he wants to go backwards and step on the gas -- and shoots forward. This
happens over and over and over again. I know of a lot of cases in which
there haven't been accidents, and I would be very surprised if it hadn't
happened when there were accidents.

"Why? Why did we throw away the standardization that had been achieved to
build in another booby trap for the driver? We know the answers to these
things. We've learned them in aviation. We've learned the importance of
standardization -- standardization in motion and standardization in
position. In a report written in 1944 on standardization of position and
shape-coding of knobs it was stated that when the operator could look --
when visual clues were present -- maintaining position of controls is of
primary importance. Yet, if the position is changed but the shape of the
handle or knob remains constant, little loss of performance is
encountered. The most efficient procedure is to maintain both position and
shape constant.

"This, gentlemen, was written 17 years ago and yet there are cars on the
road today with the headlight switch right next to the cigarette lighter.
I know this because I turned out my headlights at 50 miles an hour on a
country road reaching to light a cigarette. Identical shapes right next to
each other. There are others in which the air-vent knob is right next to
the headlight switch and both are identical. So you reach down in the dark
because your feet are getting cold. You've got too much air -- and you
snap out your headlights. And the report in the newspaper says of the
investigation: 'The car went out of control.' It sure did!" 

-- 
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