Significant advances in aviation technology usually arrive not with a brilliant flash of light and poof of smoke but over many years, in a slow, inexorable evolution of products that we sometimes don’t even recognize as signifying a momentous change until, suddenly, the next incredible new capability is in our midst.
When we stop to think about all the marvelous innovations that have emerged in the last 20 years — precision satellite-based approach capability, synthetic-vision flight displays, integrated terrain and traffic alert systems, inflight datalink weather graphics — none of these appeared in our cockpits overnight. They migrated, drifted down, sometimes with imperceptible slowness from business jets and airliners, eventually into the airplanes we fly.
