As an airline captain with tens of thousands of hours, I’m going to take a bit of a contrarian stance here. Of course we know what all of the buttons and switches that are meant for us to use are, but in some planes, there are a series of switches in the back that are solely meant to be used by maintenance personnel, on the ground.

Thank you to whoever Uretsky Aviation is. While I can certainly identify most of these, some fall in the “Don’t Touch” category for pilots. And then there are these:

Buttons! Hundreds of them!

Not really. They’re circuit breakers, not all that different from the ones in your house. We do not have these memorized; I have much more important things to do with my brain cells. If something goes wrong, the associated circuit breaker pops, and then we deal with it.

If a checklist tells us to pull a particular circuit breaker, there’s a bingo card-like system for finding the correct one. “Row G; column 22.”

But rest assured, the stuff we need to know and use – we have that nailed.