The Problems of Touchscreens In the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes a recent blog post from BoingBoing: The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the most crammed-with-digital-tech fighter jet in history, the product of a multi-decade, trillion-dollar design process that has been famously messy. But the jet is out there, and pilots are flying it. One big design shift with the F-35 is that it removes many of the small physical switches that crowded older jet cockpits, and replaces them with a big touchscreen... The folks at the Husk-Kit aviation magazine got an (anonymous) pilot of the F-35 to give their candid assessment of the plane, and it turns out the touchscreen causes some serious problems - for this pilot, anyway, an astounding error rate of 20% while trying to activate a feature.

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