Glass Cockpit

A glass cockpit is an aircraft flight deck built around electronic, digital flight instrument displays, typically large liquid crystal screens showing a primary flight display and one or more multi function displays, in place of the many individual mechanical gauges, often called steam gauges, that filled earlier cockpits. Because the displayed information can be reconfigured by the pilots as needed and is generated by flight management computers, electronic attitude and heading reference systems and air data computers rather than mechanical gyroscopes, a glass cockpit simplifies operation and navigation and has allowed airlines to remove the flight engineer position from many aircraft, lowering operating costs. The approach began in military aircraft in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example in the Mark II avionics of the F-111D, ordered in 1967 and delivered between 1970 and 1973, which included an early multi function display, and Boeing designed an early commercial glass cockpit for the 2707 supersonic transport before that program was cancelled in 1971. Research by NASA in the years that followed helped bring the glass cockpit into widespread use across commercial aviation.