Not necessarily. There are many moments during the operation of an aircraft where full attention is paramount. Yes, you see a pilot leaving the cockpit to use the lavatory while the co-pilot is monitoring the autopilot, but the margins are just as small as operating a motor vehicle.
My partner is a first officer, and frequently describes his job as being a glorified babysitter outside of takeoff and landing.
Worth noting that a significant amount of the information pilots use in the cockpit (at major US carriers, at least), things like flight plans, are on an iPad.
... until something goes wrong. Then a touch screen is the last thing you want. An airliner moving uncontrollably is no time to try touching just the right spot of the screen, and avoid touching the wrong spot.
Kinda like trying to flip just the right toggle switch and avoid flipping the wrong one?
Just because it's on a touchscreen doesn't mean it has to be tiny and hard to touch. A 17" touchscreen could have fewer controls than the same hardware panel. And the controls could be bigger on the touchscreen.
It’s not like trying to flip just the right toggle. You’ve flipped it thousands of times and memorized its exact location through haptic memory. You gently feel the surroundings to ensure your hand is in the right location and then you make the decisive motion with your fingers. You don’t need to look while doing this. This is how hands work. This is how you type. I wish people would stop pretending they don’t understand this.
Many switches are flipped once or twice on takeoff, then again before or after landing. Depending on the plane (small GA aircraft or airliner or anything inbetween) there could be 4 or 5 switches to flip in total before takeoff, or 30-40. One of the most ubiquitously used controls in aircraft are concentric rotary encoders though, with a button integrated in them if you press the top of the encoder. Those are used to do menu navigation in the GPS units used in many planes, or for altitude/heading selectors in autopilot units.
Worth mentioning that these days GPS units seem to be getting touchscreens but usually still aren't losing the physical buttons.
I can just as easily make the argument the other way around: An airliner moving uncontrollably is no time to try touching just the right knob (of which there are like a hundred), and avoid touching the wrong one.
You'd be wrong. The critical controls are uniquely shaped so that the pilot can put his hands quickly on the correct one and know it's correct.
Part of pilot training (at least in my dad's day in the AF) was blindfolding the pilot and the instructor names a control, and the student must put his hands on it. Or he flunks.
I don't believe this is equivalent though.
With hardware controls, most (if not all) of them are immediately accessible at all times. With proper training, body movement and tactile feedback will train your muscle memory which will help you find the right control without much of a hassle.
The technology exists, but autoland functionality depends on the plane model and the airport. Usually, most of the approach is done with ILS with the final moments being manual.
Absolutely not true. In cruise, stabilized, especially with AP - the margins are MUCH MUCH higher. Pilots have fallen asleep (two of them) - overflown airports still landed etc.
I think major difference is commercial airliner vs say fighter jet. As a layman it still seems pretty wrong to make most of the screen highly dynamic. Maybe designated one on the side.
Back to the topic - in car, unless specifically intended for other passengers, driver should never stare on some stupid screen in a place way off the line of sight for driving. Whenever I do that even for a split second in my 15-year old bmw (checking if that knob is really for what I want), there can be an atomic blast in front of me and I wouldn't see it.
I'm not arguing for touch screens - I don't like them, but to say a commercial pilot in cruise at 30K in controlled airspace with controlled separations and TCAS / ADS-B has margins as low as someone driving 85 MPH with traffic literally 50 feet in front of them is absolutely ridiculous. The spacing distances alone are 100x different (in terms of travel time).
Deaths and injuries per mile traveled supports the idea that flying is MUCH MUCH safer.
Modern airliners are just short of autonomous. Even if they aren't, unless you are landing or on initial ascent, you are generally minutes away from catastrophic outcomes regardless of your control inputs. In fact, most of the time, if something bad is happening, simply letting go of the controls will lead to the issue resolving itself.
A car is very often fractions of a second away from a serious accident.
A plane at cruise altitude is rarely less than minutes away (unless, in some planes, you are actively trying to crash the plane/make the wings fall off)
Indian Road Congress specifications recommend 3.5m minimum lane width for multi lane roads, 1.06m minimum center margin. Airplanes complex enough for touchscreen interfaces would be awful tight in those margins ;)
