User-Friendliness

Beautiful but unforgiving, early trainers, like this Ryan, proved a challenge for new pilots, sometimes even a fatal one. Photo By Julian Herzog (Website), CC BY 3.0, Via Wikimedia Commons.

This is a major factor in the success of any technology that aims for mainstream market acceptance. Examples? Electrical outlets that won't occasionally send you flying back across the room, automobiles you don't have to hand crank, and computers you can use without knowing how to code. With airplanes, there are so many hurdles to user-friendliness, it's hard to know where to start. Those of us who learned to fly in Pipers and Cessnas and Diamonds have no idea how squirrelly antique airplanes are. I've flown a few that tested the limits of my piloting ability to keep straight and level. Would I get used to flying such planes? I have faith that I would.

But that begs the question, why would any airplane maker build a plane that you had to fight to maintain control? The only answer I can come up with is, they didn't know any better. Once technologies came about that effectively eliminated what we today think about as poor flying qualities, but which were once regarded simply as flying qualities, every respectable plane maker put them into their designs. I grew up driving stick shifts, but it's no surprise that they are about as rare as hand cranks on the front of the hood.

I'm proud that I know how to drive a stick, though, honestly, it's so second nature that it doesn't feel any more difficult than driving a car with an automatic stick shift. But many folks believe that the craft of flying, the stick and rudder stuff, the taildragger skills, are a central part of the experience. But the immediate and long-lasting success of models that eliminated all of those things, like the Cessna 172 and Piper PA-28, shows that user-friendliness sells.

J BeckettWriter