Top 8 Aircraft Electronics Innovations

There is no shortage of things for pilots to be concerned about, and at or near the top of the list are a handful of serious weather phenomena. There’s inflight icing, fog, high winds, turbulence, mountain wave and garden-variety cloud obstruction, to name most of the biggies. But by far, the most hazardous weather phenomenon […]

The inclusion of headsets in a list of critical aviation technologies might seem off target, but it is not. Especially in small planes, which are almost universally too loud for our hearing health, a good noise-canceling headset is a critical pilot tool.  Headsets have been around for a long time, and early models were heavy, […]

It’s rare for planes to run into each other in the vast skies above, but when they do, it’s almost always catastrophic. And it often inspires regulatory change. It was the 1956 collision between a Douglas DC-7 and a Lockheed Constellation over the Grand Canyon, killing all 128 aboard the two planes, that launched the […]

The development by the United States Department of Defense of the Global Positioning System (GPS) was a watershed in area navigation, though it wasn’t the first such system. Before civil-use GPS came along in the late 1980s, there were already a few area navigation systems, though few ever made their way into the flight decks […]

To many pilots, an autopilot is a dumb mechanical aid, something you can use to take a look at the chart without going off course or busting altitude. And they are that. But today’s digital autopilots are so much more, too. Autopilots work on one common principle. The system uses navigation, heading and attitude inputs […]

The idea of an electronic moving map that knows our precise position in the air and can keep track of and display an ever-changing picture of the world below is a fantasy that every pilot who ever struggled with folding paper charts entertained often. And when a few enabling technologies—GPS, low-cost displays and high-powered small […]

The instrument landing system is a presumptuous, even boastful name. Even when it was introduced, it was hardly the first or the only system for helping an airplane find the airport in conditions of low visibility through the use of instruments. But just as no one complained when Muhammad Ali called himself “The Greatest,” because […]

There is no shortage of miracle technologies we pilots take for granted. I’d argue that near the top of the list should be in-flight radio communications. Most pilots think that radios have been around forever, and they’re not far from being right about that. You won’t find any photos of Orville sending reports to Wilbur […]