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I’m asked a lot about the pro’s and con’s of digital flat screen ‘glass’ cockpits for the Foxbat and Vixxen aircraft.\u00a0The quality and reliability of LSA\/recreational digital instruments has improved immensely over the last 5 years and, although they are not inexpensive, they actually represent reasonable value for money – particularly when compared with their GA-certified counterparts.<\/p>\n
Personally, I am a great one\u00a0for old ‘steam’ gauges – easy to see in all lights, relatively simple and usually reliable. Although I must agree that reliability of the current crop of ‘glass’ cockpits is not an issue. And digital screens do have some big benefits – visual and audible warnings if\/when any set parameter is exceeded; an almost infinite number of ways to customise the look of the information; a high degree of modularity – meaning you can add bits like a fuel computer or an autopilot at a relatively reasonable cost at a later time; and, last but not least, most digital panels have a datalogger which enables you to review flight and engine information from\u00a0previous flights. This can be particularly useful – as we have found – when analysing ‘incidents’ and ‘accidents’ which the aircraft may have\u00a0experienced.<\/p>\n
However, a particular question has been raised a couple of times recently, by pilots\/buyers with\u00a0quite different aviation backgrounds – one, a very experienced airline pilot, the other a novice student pilot. The question was: ‘Do digital screens tend to focus the pilot inside<\/em><\/span> the aircraft?’ And, I suppose by implication, that if they do, this is a bad thing, where sport and recreational flying is so much about what’s going on outside the aeroplane – ‘see and be seen’ and all that.<\/p>\n The point made by the airline pilot was that what’s going on outside a commercial jetliner\u00a0is almost (but not always!) irrelevant. The screens provide all the data you could possibly need to negotiate the aircraft from wheels up on departure from airport A to wheels down at airport B. If such a pilot decides to buy an LSA with a digital panel they will, so it goes, be more likely to be looking at the screen a much higher proportion of the time than looking outside.<\/p>\n The point being made by the ab initio pilot was that while you’re learning, you can become transfixed by\u00a0the figures on the screen. Let’s take\u00a0digital speed readouts – eg a pilot manual approach speed of 57\u00a0knots \u00a0is something you have to concentrate\u00a0on much more\u00a0than a\u00a0wavering analogue needle, which points somewhere (on average) between 55 and 60 knots. So you try to stick\u00a0to the magic digital 57 knots to the exclusion of some outward attention.<\/p>\n It’s all a far cry from the days when a slip ball was the most prominent instrument in the aircraft, and the only compulsory gauges were a compass, an airspeed indicator and an altimeter. With maybe engine rpm and oil pressure if you were lucky!<\/p>\n So having heard these points of view from pilots from very different perspectives – what’s your view? Do digital screens tend to focus the pilot\u00a0inside<\/em><\/span>\u00a0the aircraft, to the detriment of good external observation?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m asked a lot about the pro’s and con’s of digital flat screen ‘glass’ cockpits for the Foxbat and Vixxen aircraft.\u00a0The quality and reliability of LSA\/recreational digital instruments has improved immensely over the last 5 years and, although they are … Continue reading