Comments

Glass cockpit avionics are wonderful for keeping up with situational awareness and generally allowing a pilot to fly with greater confidence. Sadly, many pilots operate these systems with only the most basic knowledge of them to complete an uneventful flight, thereby requiring greater heads-down time to program them and creating distraction from the primary task of flying the aircraft. Once, I received an irate call from an FBO because I set the G1000 map orientation in a rental to north-up for my flight, and the pilot flying after me did not know how to reset it for track-up. Pilotage and VOR navigation are rapidly becoming lost arts because students are routinely being taught to hit "direct to" and follow the straight pink line on the GPS screen. Due to the sensitive nature of financial constraints on the part of both students and flight schools, enough time is not allotted to ground instruction in running glass cockpits because it robs time from flying. Such instruction is often accomplished in the air while the mind of a student is rightly occupied with other matters. Then the pilot goes solo and ends up in a panic or gets lost when the screens do something unexpected and they can't get it back to displaying the GPS map. I also find low-end (under $100k) simulators to be poorly set up for learning glass cockpit systems. I use one with an instructor for practicing instrument flight and, when necessary, keeping my instrument currency. While the controls are in the same place as an actual cockpit, the shape of some knobs are different, sometimes causing confusion by requiring that I visually look for the knob (in the dark) and verify that I have the right one before turning it. They also tend to have a lag time and don't work if I turn a knob faster than the computer system can keep up. Of course, the airlines make sure their pilots are experts in the systems they fly. This is not a requirement for the GA population and the accident record shows it. The added complexity can become overwhelming when a flight does not go as planned. During such moments, responses that have not become ingrained and automatic during times of stress will be of little use during an emergency.