Glass cockpits
The PFD and MFD redraw the six-pack on two screens, fed by solid-state sensors instead of spinning gyros — the physics is identical, the failure modes are not.
13 min read · Flight instruments
After this lesson you can
- Locate every six-pack instrument on a PFD and MFD, including the one gauge that moves to a different screen.
- Explain what AHRS and ADC actually compute, and what they still depend on to do it.
- Read a trend vector and use it correctly during a level-off or a speed change.
- Describe how a glass panel degrades, and where each lost function reappears.
A glass cockpit does not measure anything new. Every quantity on a Primary Flight Display, airspeed, altitude, attitude, heading, vertical speed, still comes from the same physics covered earlier in this module: pitot and static pressure, and a reference for attitude and heading. What changes is the sensor that measures it and the screen that shows it, and both of those changes are real enough to deserve their own lesson.
The PFD groups everything that used to be six separate dials into a single, coherent picture, and the Multi-Function Display (MFD) adds engine data, moving maps, and weather that no mechanical panel ever carried. The tradeoff is that a glass panel concentrates risk differently than a mechanical one: instead of six independent gauges that fail one at a time, there are sensors and screens that can fail together, and knowing exactly what backs each one up matters more, not less.
The rest of this lesson
- 1.The PFD: one screen, six instruments
- 2.AHRS and ADC: what actually feeds the screen
- 3.The MFD and engine monitoring
- 4.Tapes and trend vectors
- 5.What fails, and where it reappears
- 6.Mechanical and glass panels, side by side
These 6 sections, their figures, the checks along the way and the end-of-lesson quiz come with the PPL track. Paid once, yours for good.
Key terms
Try to recall each definition before turning the card.