Aircraft Flight Instruments

Flight instruments are the devices in an aircraft cockpit, or built into an aircraft's structure, that measure and record data about the aircraft's own flight situation, such as altitude, acceleration, remaining fuel and heading, for the pilot, the maintenance crew or an accident investigation. Unlike an aircraft's avionics display and automation systems, an instrument in this class is fundamentally a sensor or a recorder: an altimeter measures altitude from air pressure, an accelerometer measures the rate of change of the aircraft's velocity, a fuel gauge measures the remaining fuel in a tank, an inertial navigation system computes position from onboard motion sensors, and a flight recorder preserves flight data for later reconstruction of an incident. This class gathers the atlas's own instrumentation and sensing inventions of this shared kind.