Most pilots believe that it’s easier to fly IFR with a big flat-glass primary flight display (PFD) instead of the six-pack of mechanical instruments. Until recently I wasn’t convinced. I don’t know of any controlled studies that have compared the pilot workload, or the precision of basic attitude, altitude, heading and airspeed control, when flying the electronic PFD or mechanical steam gauges. There has been considerable human factors research into various symbols and graphical presentation of primary flight instruments, but I don’t know of any experiments that have taken significantly sized groups of non-instrument rated pilots and trained a control group on one type of display and compared it to the performance of a similar group using the other style of instruments.
Opinions by experienced IFR pilots on the subject are almost meaningless. I am convinced that a pilot with a well-developed instrument scan and good situational awareness will do a perfectly fine job of flying with either style of display.
