Improvements on Flight Control UI Interaction

I’ve been thinking of some improvement ideas on how we interact with the flight control UI, to make them more “realistic”. Below are my thoughts. I used an extra picture to illustrate the concept and I hope it’s allowed.

1. Swipe-able gear button

How it is currently
The gear is controlled by touching the gear button.

How to improve

To simulate the gear lever on most aircraft, the gear button can be changed to a swipe-able button like the flight spoiler. Just like in a real aircraft, you retract the gear by swiping the gear button up, resembling the gear lever operation. Similarly, you extend the gear by swiping it down. In this way we can even simulate the “OFF” position on the 737NG family, but that could come in a future iteration.

2. Reverse detents on power levers

How it is currently

The reverse thrust is right below idle (0%), with the max reverse being the same as TOGA but towards opposite direction. If we want to operate the reverse realistically, we need to first manually hold the reverse at ~60%-80%, then move up to 20% reverse to simulate reverse idle.
This causes two problems:

  1. Each time my reverse thrust percentage is different, so sometimes I decelerate too fast, and sometimes too slow.
  2. It’s a pain to simulate reverse idle, because it’s too close to normal idle, and a tiny movement could cause the reverser to stow.

How to improve

I came up with two ideas.

  1. Add a dead zone between normal idle and reverse idle. When we drag the slider down, it snaps to the REV IDLE detent instead of the normal idle detent as of now. Besides, the max reverse is reduced from 100% to about 70%, so we can just slide it all the way down to apply max reverse.
  2. The idea is the same, but the dead zone is horizontal. To activate idle reverse, you slide the button to the right, then down for the full reverse. This is kind of similar to a real aircraft where the reverse can only be activated when you pull a lever on the throttle.

These are some of my ideas that hopefully don’t require deeper modifications of control logic and aircraft systems. Let me know your thoughts!

Great feature topic with some great ideas, voted! :)

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