https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx7-yvXf6f8
A lot of research went into everything from the gender to the tone of the voice so that pilots would know to immediately pay attention to the warning system above everything else.
Those high-pitched piezo speaker beepers are cheap and simple, but it is difficult to localize where the beep is coming from, and the single frequency can't communicate much. Mostly, you can't tell if your gate beeped, or the one next to you.
His solution was, among other things, to turn it from a beep to a bell tone. That alone made it better.
It seems like the audio design of things is often missed. I'm excited about products like Google's Home and Amazon's Echo because we're finally considering audio as a first-class user interface.
And now and off-topic question: why would rolling right stop a plane from going in the sea?
Any time you bank the wings of a plane to make a turn, you have to also pull back on the stick to maintain the same amount of lift to keep you in level flight. The more you bank, the more 'back stick' you need to maintain the lift.
It's a logarithmic corellation, i.e. in a 90 degree banked turn, it is impossible (you need infinite lift) to maintain altitude.
Most aircraft get to the point where the bank is just to steep and you cannot generate enough lift to hold your altitude any longer. Pulling back on the stick some more will just end up bleeding off airspeed and putting you into a stall/spin. At that point your only recourse is to go back to 'wings level' and rebuild airspeed.
PDF Warning: Page 121 - Aerodynamic Forces in Flight Maneuvers
https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/a...
And according to that wikipedia link, most of it was wrong or conflicting!