Side stick or yoke

The centre control yoke is good to clip the map onto. Also, you rest the paper on it. But it gets in the way when the hostie is trying to sit on your lap!!!!!

Doc – I’m referred to as an SFO in the company (Senior First Officer). People usually join as an ordinary FO and then get promoted to SFO after a certain amount of experience. Next step is Captain just as soon as the old buggers start dying off at the top of the seniority list! I’ve just summarised my voyage to this position on one of the other threads (either ‘becoming a commercial pilot’ or the other one).

Tenthije – With one central location for thrust levers all aircraft require a hand change to fly from the other seat regardless of whether it is a sidestick or a yoke. People only ever tend to think about it when referred to a sidestick! It’s not a problem in the same way that if you are used to driving a right hand drive car it is easy to get in a left hand drive one when you go on holiday.

I’ve always wondered about one thing regarding the side-sticks:

What if you are a left handed co-pilot or a right handed pilot? Would that make it more of a hassle to use the side stick? Also, when you promote from co-pilot to pilot, how hard is it t get used to the stick being on the “wrong” side?

Having been introduced by airbus into commercial aviation, the sidestick appears to be their favorite control column for fly-by-wire-aircraft. And why use a large yoke if a modern sidestick does as fine anyways. Boeing using fly-by-wire on its 777s uses a mixture because they have fly-by-wire but a traditional yoke, which to me appears to be a matter of cockpit-commonality but also philosophy since boeing says yokes are better for controling the aircraft, which airbus completely denies. By the way, having space for newspaper or food in the cockpit is not the worst, as wysiwyg pointed out.

I am an airbus fan, as I spent 3 weeks in the Hamburg-Finkenwerder plant and got to see a lot of the technical stuff, as you probably noticed. Nevertheless, boeing aircraft are fine to me too.

wysiwyg: are you a FO/Captain with TCX? If yes, how did you get that job and, once again, how about the finances?

brgs
Doc_D@ddel

…and interferes with the cheese and biscuits on my meal tray!

wysiwyg wrote once that the yoke was a bore to read the newspaper. 🙂

I was watching an A320 doc on Discovery last night and they said the side stick was to create more cockpit space and a clearer view of the flight instruments for the pilots.