ABSTRACT
Until the 1970s, aircrew had fairly rudimentary avionic systems at their disposal: simple analogue instruments, stick and throttle, a weapon control system, a weapon aiming system and, if they were lucky, a radar and some sort of navigation system. The crew had very little information to assimilate and very few systems that required active control. Unfortunately, the cockpits of most of these early generation aircraft were ergonomic disaster areas so they could be extremely difficult to operate effectively, even though the roles they had to perform were relatively simple. On the other hand, most aircraft had at least 2 crew to share the workload. There were single-seat aircraft around, such as the Lightning, in which workload was high, bujt manning and recruitment in the RAF was high enough to assure a steady stream of more capable aircrew onto more demanding aircraft.
