You are correct, you can read about the standards of lever shape, placement and operation in FAR 23 for Normal, Utility, Aerobatic and Commuter category aircraft.
I think you’re thinking of the B-17 rather than the B-52 though. The B-17 was a very complex airplane for its day, a very early test flight crashed on takeoff because the crew did not remove control locks. This incident is often cited as the reason why checklists are so prevalent in aviation. The B-17 had what we’d now think of as weird controld, but the B-24 Liberator built only a few years later and concurrently with the B-17 has more typical controls laid out more or less as you would now including a wheel-shaped gear lever on the left and a flap shaped flap lever on the right, a good distance aft of the engine controls. These predate the B-52 by a decade.
You’d never mistake the gear lever for the thrust levers in a B-52; there aren’t eight gear levers.
You are correct, you can read about the standards of lever shape, placement and operation in FAR 23 for Normal, Utility, Aerobatic and Commuter category aircraft.
I think you’re thinking of the B-17 rather than the B-52 though. The B-17 was a very complex airplane for its day, a very early test flight crashed on takeoff because the crew did not remove control locks. This incident is often cited as the reason why checklists are so prevalent in aviation. The B-17 had what we’d now think of as weird controld, but the B-24 Liberator built only a few years later and concurrently with the B-17 has more typical controls laid out more or less as you would now including a wheel-shaped gear lever on the left and a flap shaped flap lever on the right, a good distance aft of the engine controls. These predate the B-52 by a decade.
You’d never mistake the gear lever for the thrust levers in a B-52; there aren’t eight gear levers.