Flying the Desk

The terminology ``flying the desk'' has had a bad connotation for aviators over the years, inferring that a pilot has been relegated from the aircraft cockpit to an earthbound office. A unique advanced transport flight station design, described in this paper, could change that implication. The Lockheed-Georgia Company, in a joint project with NASA, has designed, developed, and fabricated a high fidelity flight station simulator for researching issues pertaining to transport aircraft of the mid-1990s and beyond. Early in the program the need and operational requirements for an advanced transport were identified, operating environments were forecast, and technologies available for application to future aircraft were projected. The flight station and all crew systems were designed and initially tested in a full scale mockup by operational line pilots. The refined design was then incorporated into three identical full-mission flight station simulators located at NASA's Ames and Langley Research Centers and at Lockheed's plant in Marietta, Georgia. These simulators contain the unique Pilot's Desk Flight Station design, a radical departure from traditional transport cockpits. The desk design resembles an office or laboratory workstation.