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The Benefits of Glass Cockpit Aircraftby Max Trescott
It wasn’t immediately obvious to me that hanging two computer displays on the front panel of an airplane added any value. That may seem surprising coming from an avid, life-long pilot who spent twenty-five years working in high technology in Silicon Valley. If anyone would appreciate it, you’d think it would be a trained electrical engineer. Over the years however, I’ve seen a few products emerge from the lab which were charitably called “solutions in search of a problem.” Bright people dreamed up these elegant designs which did work. Unfortunately, the devices didn’t sell because few people were interested in spending money to solve those particular problems! So when glass cockpits first arrived in small planes, I was skeptical, believing that once again someone had dreamed up a solution for a problem that didn’t exist. After all, those round gauges had been working well for pilots for almost 90 years. Seeing is BelievingMy first flight behind a G1000 glass cockpit was in a Cessna 182. Another flight instructor was checking me out in the aircraft and the flight, which lasted less than an hour, consisted of flying a nearby ILS approach, once with the autopilot and once manually. The entire flight was a blur, yet at some level I knew that something about it was fundamentally different—I just didn’t know what. I went home to think about it and then it struck me. For the entire flight, my eyes almost never left the Primary Flight Display (PFD). For the first time in my life, I was able to aviate, navigate and communicate using a single 10-inch display directly in front of me. Safety was clearly enhanced, since my eyes never had to leave the instruments. Eureka! This was fundamentally different. I went on to write Max Trescott’s G1000 Glass Cockpit Handbook, and in the first edition I listed the glass cockpit benefits named in various studies. But after several years of teaching almost daily in these aircraft, I realize now that the studies missed some of the biggest benefits, which I’ve added to the third edition of my book. The biggest benefit of glass cockpit aircraft is that the equipment frees a properly trained pilot from mundane tasks, such as keeping the wings level, while providing the information needed for him or her to make decisions about more important tasks. These include monitoring the current weather versus the forecast, both en route and at the destination, monitoring aircraft performance and fuel consumption, and continually evaluating alternatives throughout the flight. Fully 80% of aircraft accidents are related to faulty pilot decision making, so glass cockpits will likely improve safety by reducing pilot workload and providing better data for decision making. Another major benefit is the reduced effort to maintain an instrument scan. While it’s not initially obvious, scanning a round gauge panel requires the eye to continually jump across two boundaries—the edges of adjacent instruments—before refocusing on the center of the next instrument. By contrast, glass panels have no artificial boundaries between instruments and it’s less tiring for the eye to sweep along a single pane of glass, acquiring information from each indicator. As I mentioned before, a benefit of the G1000 glass cockpit is that it allows you to aviate, navigate and communicate from a single 10-inch display. The advantage of this is obvious. Getting distracted while flying and failing to monitor the instruments can be fatal. In my book, I talk about two IFR accidents involving pilots who were distracting from looking at their instruments. Neither accident is likely to have occurred in a G1000-equipped Cessna 172, a popular training aircraft. You might think that since glass cockpits are more heavily dependent upon electricity, that they’re less reliable than round gauge aircraft. However, unlike older aircraft, modern glass cockpit aircraft have multiple electrical systems, so in most cases you’d need to have at least two failures occur before you’re force to use the standby instruments. And when you have a single failure, you still have far more information available then when a failure occurs in a round gauge airplane. When you learn to fly, choosing whether or not to learn in a glass cockpit aircraft may be one of the decisions you make. Some people ask which glass cockpit system is better, the Garmin G1000 or the Avidyne Entegra. That’s actually the wrong question, since both systems are vastly superior to traditional round gauge systems. Given the choice, I would always choose to fly either one of these glass cockpits over a round gauge airplane. If your experience is anything like mine, you won’t fully appreciate the benefits of a glass cockpit aircraft until you actually go out and fly one. I strongly urge you to do this. But beware. Once you do, you might never want to fly a round gauge airplane again!
It is our privilege to present regularly featured articles by Max Trescott on Flight-Training-Info.com as he is considered to be the foremost authority on flight training in and piloting of Glass Cockpit equipped general aviation aircraft. Return to the top of: The Benefits of Glass Cockpit Aircraft
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The transition to glass cockpit aircraft has occurred at cataclysmic speed in an industry traditionally known for little change. For example, many of the planes people train in are over 30 years old and the planes built throughout this time are fundamentally the same. 
