Flight Simulation Software

9 The Instructor Station

You can observe a lot just by watching.

Yogi Berra

The term Instructor Operating Station (IOS) is a generic term for the computer system and the software used to manage and supervise a simulator session. In a training situation, the supervision of a simulator session is primarily a training role. In airline simulators, the instructor is located on the flight deck directly behind the flight crew. In military simulators and in simulators where space is limited, the instructor is located externally. In both situations, the instructor manages and controls the session and monitors the flight crew actions, interacting with a computer screen, setting conditions, selecting options and monitoring information generated by the IOS (Ahn, 1997). In an engineering flight simulator, the purpose of the IOS is to set conditions, manage the session and collect and record data from tests. From a software perspective, in all these applications of flight simulation, the IOS is a graphical user interface (GUI).

9.1 Requirements

9.1.1 User Interfaces

Most users will have experienced GUIs in word-processing, spreadsheets, computer-aided design (CAD) applications and a wide range of desktop applications. The temptation is to assume that all GUIs are the same and that a general form of a GUI is appropriate as an IOS interface. Neither assumption is valid; the design and capability of a GUI are invariably dependent on the application. For example, in a word-processing package, ...