The read test

So here's what he saw, cold, before I'd said a word about any of it.

The vehicle health cluster he read straight off the screen: ESC health, aircraft health, propeller health, R2 online, stabilised mode. The radar he got immediately, right down to calling a contact at seventy metres. Battery and boost he read correctly too, two laps of decent battery and nine minutes of flight left. All of which was lovely, and then it stopped going my way.

The altitude and vertical speed indicator he understood perfectly well and then told me they were on the wrong side of the display. My proximity and threat bar, which I'd spent a properly embarrassing amount of time on, he looked at and said "battery, maybe". And the track map, where I'd labelled the upcoming gate as G10, he read as a ten-G turn, because to a pilot G means G-force and it doesn't mean anything else and it never will.

Two misreads out of six. Those two failures were worth the whole hour on their own, and what really got me is that both of them were things I'd already had a wobble about privately.

Where he was right and I was wrong

The big one was the motors, or rather the fact that I shouldn't have been watching them at all. I had all eight rotors reporting RPM and temperature, which felt thorough and is in fact useless, because motors on a speeder sit in an enormous amount of airflow and are perfectly happy at full speed, and if one is running hot in all that cool air then something mechanical has already gone wrong and you've got bigger problems. The thing that actually matters is the ESC, the electronic speed controller, which takes raw battery power and turns it into the pulses that tell the motor what to do. As Zeph put it, the motor is a dumb coil and some magnets, and it's the ESC that decides how much torque and how fast, and RPM and current and temperature are all being read off it anyway.

So the number became ESC workload, which is amps being drawn as a percentage of maximum, and eighty to ninety per cent is high. That's a far more interesting thing to put in front of a pilot than a warning light as it just drinks the battery. So what you've got is a race management dial rather than a redline. It's the electric equivalent of fuel and tyres, which is exactly the sort of thing this sport needs if people are going to shout at the telly about it.

A couple of smaller ones came out of the same conversation. Their display isn't calibrated against barometric pressure so it isn't altitude at all, it's height. And delta beats position, which he explained by telling me what he says to his own observer, which is that if somebody is gaining on him he wants to know about it, and if they're ten seconds back then be quiet and let him fly.

The bit I wasn't expecting

Somewhere in the middle of all this I started apologising for how busy it all was. Too much information, I said, I know, I'm going to strip it back.

And he stopped me, which I did not see coming. Cockpits look completely mad to the rest of us, but a trained pilot is formally assessed on the scan, which is the constant movement of the eye between instruments, and density out in the periphery is normal and expected and fine. Your focal point is about the size of a thumbnail held at arm's length and something like ninety per cent of your visual cortex is given over to it, so everything outside that is peripheral and can carry a lot more than a designer's instinct tells you it can.

Protect the centre, populate the edges. That's the rule I came away with, and I've spent most of my career decluttering interfaces on the assumption that less is always kinder to whoever has to use the thing.

The idea that beat mine

I'd gone into the call thinking the answer to overload was voice, so the pilot says remove altitude, remove position, and the display thins out around them.

His version is better and it's the thing I'll be building next. The AI co-pilot watches the pilot's psychological workload in real time and switches things off without being asked, because it knows this particular pilot and it knows what their stress looks like, since the two of them have trained together. So the pilot never manages the display at all, the display manages itself around the pilot, and that changes what the object even is. It stops being a layout and becomes something closer to a relationship. It also gives the co-pilot a proper part in the story rather than a voice in a speaker.

Underneath all of that sits the other thing we actually agreed on, which is that configurability is the feature. Let pilots pick what shows up, where it sits and what colour it is. He compared it to crosshair customisation in Counter-Strike, where the choosing is half the point and part of who you are.

What happens now

There are four states to design, so the standard ui rework, overtake, emergency, and whatever the pilot ends up building for themselves. The overtake sequence is first, because everything non-essential falling away as you close on someone and then coming back the moment you're past is the clearest way to show what all this is for, and it has to move before it makes any sense.

Then I show him version two and find out what I got wrong that time. :)

Ótimo Studio is a brand and digital practice working with ventures and incumbents that intend to last. The Airspeeder work is independent creative direction, made with the cooperation of the team. If you're building something that doesn't exist yet and it needs to feel real before it does, come and have a chat.