Airline and military pilots have had access to glass cockpits for some time now. In the past couple years, a few units like the MAGIC have been certified for high end general aviation planes (any plane that is non-military and non-airline), mostly business jets, turboprops, and high end piston powered planes. That's about to change.

Among other companies, Garmin is coming out with a sophisticated glass cockpit system for lower end general aviation planes. How low end? Well, Cessna is making it available as an option for new 182s. No price yet (and it won't be cheap), but this is a very good trend. These integrated systems make instrument flight much safer and go a long way to improving the pilot's situational awareness. The main display combines the functionality of the altimeter, airspeed indicator, turn coordinator, attitude indicator, directional gyro, vertical speed indicator, and a horizontal situation indicator all in one easy to intrepret display. It includes things like airspeed and altitude trends, making it much easier to stabilize the plane on an approach. The navigation display includes mapping data, terrain data, weather data, and traffic data. Some of them even display approach charts with your plane's position on the approach clearly marked. This is very, very cool. The Garmin system also includes an IFR certified GPS system, a communications radio, and a navigation radio with glideslope receiver in each unit. I've read that the Cessna 182 installation is about 60 pounds lighter than the conventional "steam guage" instruments it replaces, and will probably be a lot more reliable, too.

There are several glass cockpit systems available for homebuilts. They aren't certified for use in production planes, but some of them are even more sophisticated than the production displays, including such features as highway-in-the-sky (HITS) symbology and synthetic vision. My favorite is the one available from Blue Mountain Avionics, built right here in Colorado Springs. It's still a pricey unit (about $20,000 complete with digital autopilot). There are cheaper units hitting the market, such as the Grand Rapids technology EFIS Horizon Series I for about $6,000 and the Dynon EFIS-D10 for about $2,000.

The times, they are a changing. For the better.