AOPA Expo, which was held in Long Beach, California, in late October, was a fantastic success. A record-breaking attendance of 10,816 members had a chance to see the products of more than 500 exhibitors in the beautiful Long Beach Convention Center, examine 74 aircraft on static display at the airport, and choose from among some 90 educational seminars and 70 product demonstrations (see " GA on a Steady Climb"). At all of the aviation events, I am constantly on the lookout for those products that pass my "three deep" test. My way of determining what's hot is to look for those exhibit booths and aircraft that are surrounded three deep by interested pilots. Over the years I have found this to be a great litmus test for determining what products are attracting the attention of large groups of AOPA members.
This year's three-deep test was particularly rewarding, because it validated the work AOPA has been doing very silently behind the scenes for several years on the electronic display of information in the average general aviation cockpit. Pilots surrounded the exhibit booths featuring a new generation of avionics that make use of multifunction displays (MFDs). That's a fancy term for a plain and simple computer monitor on the panel. Most are about five inches diagonal, so they'll fit in the available real estate in a typical lightplane cockpit.
These MFDs are capable of displaying almost any sort of video or graphics. Frankly, there is a television-set quality about these displays, and one manufacturer bore this out by telling me you could hook a DVD player up to his unit and watch a movie! (No, I am not advocating movies in airplane cockpits.) The crowd around the dozen or so companies exhibiting these units saw various applications. And that's why this technology is so exciting. If one or two electronic displays, with the appropriate sensors for each function, could replace our many bulky mechanical gauges, pilots would gain enormous capability.
When you boil it all down, we're really talking about the same functionality we have with our home or office computers—there is a monitor (the cockpit MFD), a computer processor (the black boxes behind the panel), and a keyboard/mouse (some combination of knobs or buttons for inputting information). Watching this develop over the past few years, it isn't hard to understand that with computer displays playing such a large role in most pilots' homes or workplaces, the next place we'd all want one is in the cockpit of the plane we own or rent. The three-deep test seemed to verify that.
All of the MFDs strive to tie together information from VHF and GPS navigation receivers, and other inputs, in a color graphical display. Moving maps are the obvious result, but now users can choose the chart on which to follow the flight plan—a VFR sectional or an IFR en route chart—as well as the aeronautical and geographic features to be displayed. One manufacturer at Expo took pilots aside and showed them a prototype with Jeppesen approach plates displayed on the MFD. Situational awareness is greatly enhanced because your actual aircraft position is displayed on the electronically generated chart; at a busy or unfamiliar airport, zoom in and monitor your taxi progress.
Terrain databases populate all of the new units, and recent terrain mapping now adds obstructions. The software shows red if terrain ahead is at or above your present altitude, yellow if you will clear marginally, green if you have safe clearance, and no color if terrain is not a factor. This summer a 27-year veteran of flying charter work in Alaska, in reduced visibility conditions, said the terrain function was the best feature of these new units. This seasoned bush pilot indicated that even the most experienced "seat of the pants" aviator sees a tremendous safety advantage in this technology.
With computer screens coming to the GA cockpit, the next logical step would be the equivalent of a computer modem. In aviation this is termed datalink. Like our computer modems, which started at 300 baud and progressed to high-speed cable and DSL connections, our aviation datalink will become faster over time. In the very near future both textual and graphical color weather data will display on the MFD. Also, if an aircraft knows its position, exciting progress is being made to transmit that to the ground and other aircraft—sort of a poor man's collision avoidance system. Projects like this have kept AOPA staff busy working on committees with the government to set standards, ensure timely certification, and to make sure that there is freedom to innovate with this supplemental information, rather than the FAA telling us what we can and cannot display.
This summer I convinced my wife (sort of) to spend the dollars to update the entire avionics stack in our personal Cessna 172. The learning curve was steep for her, but she was impressed with the MFD. She's in the initial stages of her instrument training, and we talked the evening after her fourth lesson. When I asked how it went, she exclaimed that she still found herself cheating and peeking out from under the hood at times. I assured her we all did that, and that it was common to sneak a look at the ground. "Oh, no," she exclaimed. "I'm not looking at the ground. I'm glancing at the color map display to see where I am relative to the final approach fix."
As AOPA technical staff toils to help set the standards and future environment for this technology, we keep asking ourselves whether the members will find it useful. It's not for everyone, and while the cost is dropping and the operational and safety benefits are getting better, my Skyhawk panel is probably now worth more than the airframe. But if the pilots three deep at AOPA Expo are any indication, your association isn't wasting its time.
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