The greatly increased cost of fuel has intensified the need for the manufacturer to increase operating efficiency in the aerodynamic, structural and propulsion fields. These aspects have already been highly refined and further improvements will be more and more difficult to realise. However, DOC is also equally affected by equipment and crew costs and this paper therefore attempts to examine the potential for improvements to the flight deck that will determine the most cost-effective combination of crew and equipment required for the safe operation of relatively large transport aircraft.

In the past, design effort has, very logically, been concentrated on those fields that could be shown to give an obvious economic return, and since investment in new instrumentation, flight deck workload analysis and system automation showed less tangible results than increases in speed, range, payload, etc, there was no great incentive to allocate money and effort to “human engineering”.