Hm, about the view thingy. The analogy of a car is useful, if somewhat limited.
I'd like to make another analogy or two, taken from real life experience of having to watch gauges.
First: skydiving. There are basically two places you practically can place your altimeter: on your chest in the chest strap, or on your hand. Students usually have it on the chest strap, as they have a tendency to move their hand when they want to check their alt, and as a newbie, that might make you unstable in the air. Veterans tend to have it on their left hand.
When it is on your chest, it is akin to having a "look down" key to check instruments in a WWII flight sim. You duck down your head, lose contact with the horizon, essentially losing your SA and bearings for a moment. Then you locate your altimeter, and then you try to find that needle which is very quickly going towards the red area. Actually locating the needle isn't effortless, because you've tucked down your chin and is trying to remain stable.
Alternatively, you have an altimeter on the back of your hand. When you want to check your current altimeter, you move your eyes slightly to the side, focus the quarter sized focus point (and that's all we humans have) on the altimeter, and you quickly pick up the needle. During this time, you've got complete cotrol of your position relative to the horizon and other skydivers in your formation. This is akin to having most of the instruments in forward view in a computer game.
Both are doable in ksydiving, of course. But in a plane, you don't tuck your chin down onto your chest and try to locate an instrument that is wobbling in a 220 km/h wind.
Scuba diving, another of my hobbies. I got my dive computer on my left wrist (so all the "obstruction points, i.e dry suit outlet etc are on one arm, making it easy to get out) and my pressure gauge I got clipped to my buoyancy compensator. Having more than a few dives below my belt, I can predict my air consumption depending on time, workload and depth - so I more often send a quick glance towards my dive computer, rather than locate my pressure gauge (which is at a very predictable place, but still out of view), tuck head down, and reads it.
I cannot imagine that in an environment where everything happens even faster than in skydiving, you'd wish for your pilot to have to "tuck down" very much - lose your bearings, even for a brief period. And when you have these "press key to check instruments, lose bearings" solutions, I find it to be impractical as well as misrepresentative of reality.
Oh, just one other thing - some chap mentioned that none of us had flown a 109K4, and therefore everyone of us could be right (that was the essence of his argument). I'd like to call the BS on that one - I haven't been shot, but I have a good idea of what it'd be like, or cause. I haven't burned my finger off, but I've burned it, and I know enough to say "that's BS" if someone tells me it's next to painless or will feel like an "icey" sort of pain.
That line of argumentation is fallacious - it's an attempt to reach absolute relativism (nice contradiction in terms, eh?), and then use *this* as an argument to suggest that the claimants point is actually less relative, and more right. Fun type of argument, really.
lastly, I wonder why this fighter ace chap spends so much time preaching to us, and taking cheap shots that aren't really insults, but surely are disrespectful, and at least in my eyes represent an attitude that is a wee bit offensive.
Perhaps he should go back to his own camp. We've heard you, we've listened, we've commented. There's little more to say.
