The Kodiak Blog
There is a version of this conversation that aviation has been having for two decades, and it usually goes one of two ways. Either glass cockpits are celebrated as a revolution that makes flying safer and more accessible, or they are treated with suspicion as a source of automation dependency that is quietly eroding the fundamentals. Both positions contain real insight, and both, taken alone, miss the more useful point.
The honest answer is that glass cockpit training and analog training are not in competition. They develop different and complementary capabilities, and the pilots who emerge best prepared are the ones who understand both systems well enough to use each intentionally.
The debate is not glass versus analog. It is whether the pilot in front of either one has developed the underlying judgment to use the tools appropriately.
A glass cockpit is an aircraft cockpit in which traditional analog gauges are replaced by integrated digital displays. The technical term for this architecture is Electronic Flight Instrument System, or EFIS.
In a conventional analog panel, the six primary flight instruments are individual standalone units: the attitude indicator, airspeed indicator, altimeter, heading indicator, vertical speed indicator, and turn coordinator. Each instrument operates independently and presents one piece of information. Pilots learn to scan across all six in a disciplined pattern, building a running mental model of what the aircraft is doing by synthesizing the readings from each.
In a glass cockpit, those six instruments are consolidated onto a single screen called the Primary Flight Display, or PFD. A second screen — the Multi-Function Display, or MFD — provides weather data, terrain awareness, traffic overlays via ADS-B, and a full-color moving GPS map. In practical terms, the transition from an analog panel to a glass cockpit is less like upgrading a component and more like moving from a desktop with six separate monitors to a single integrated workstation.
The Garmin G1000 has been the defining glass cockpit system in general aviation since 2004. The Garmin Perspective+ system, which equips the Cirrus SR20 and SR22, builds on the G1000 foundation with additional integration including autopilot coupling, electronic stability and protection (ESP), and the CAPS interface. By the mid-2010s, more than 98 percent of new general aviation aircraft were leaving the factory with electronic flight instruments rather than analog panels.
The case for foundational analog training is not nostalgia. The discipline of scanning a six-pack panel is the fundamental cognitive exercise of IFR flight. Instructors with experience teaching on both platforms consistently report that students who learn on analog panels develop stronger scan habits more quickly than students who learn on glass, because the glass PFD consolidates so much information into a single, visually compelling display that students naturally anchor their attention to it.
This matters practically: even pilots who fly glass cockpit aircraft exclusively will encounter situations requiring the analog scan, because all glass cockpit aircraft carry backup analog instruments for exactly the failure mode where the display hardware fails. There is also a related argument that pilots who train on analog panels develop a more direct sense of what the aircraft is doing — a mental model constructed from raw data rather than read from a display.
I have a lot of respect for pilots who learned on steam gauges. The scan they built, the way they cross-check, the fact that they have actually navigated without a moving map — those are not just old-school credentials. Those are skills. — Harbour Dollinger, Kodiak Aviation, Falcon Field
The most significant advantage of glass cockpit aviation in a training context is the quality of situational awareness it makes available to the pilot who has learned to use it properly. A PFD presents attitude, airspeed, altitude, heading, navigation deviation, and vertical speed in a way that enables the pilot to perceive relationships between data points rather than having to construct them mentally.
Managing automation is a genuine flight skill, and it is one the professional aviation world demands. The FAA recognized this when it revised 14 CFR 61.129 in 2018 to allow commercial pilot certification training requirements to be met in technically advanced aircraft. Research conducted at Middle Tennessee State University found that students using a TAA-based scenario training syllabus completed their instrument ratings with an average of 88.66 flight hours, compared to 134.3 hours for students using a traditional analog-based syllabus.
A survey of general aviation pilots found that 74% preferred flying glass cockpit aircraft to analog. But the same survey found that 80% were concerned that over-reliance on glass displays could lead to unsafe flight operations. Both instincts are correct.
The genuine risk of glass cockpit aviation is not that the displays themselves degrade pilot skill. It is that the richness and visual salience of glass displays can capture a pilot's attention, reducing the time the eyes spend looking outside the aircraft. Research using eye-tracking data found that pilots flying glass cockpits allocated roughly 35 percent of their visual attention to the PFD alone.
The second real risk is automation mode confusion — a situation in which the pilot has engaged an autopilot mode without fully understanding what the automation is currently doing. Both of these risks are training problems, not technology problems. The technology does not create the dependency. Undisciplined use of the technology does.
One consistently reported observation among flight instructors is that the transition from analog to glass is considerably smoother than the transition from glass to analog. This argues for a deliberate sequencing in glass cockpit training: ensuring that the foundational scan habits and the ability to fly precise attitudes by reference to individual raw instruments are genuinely established before the pilot becomes fully dependent on the integrated display.
The simulator is where we work on partial panel. Cover the PFD, fly the approach on backup instruments. It is uncomfortable at first, especially for pilots who have done most of their training on glass. That discomfort is exactly the point. The Perspective+ system is excellent. You still need to be able to fly without it. — Harbour Dollinger, Kodiak Aviation, Falcon Field
Learn the system architecture before you fly it. The Garmin G1000 and Perspective+ are sophisticated computers with layered menu structures and mode-dependent behavior that is not self-evident on first encounter. The cockpit is not an optimal environment for learning how the MFD's terrain display is configured.
Build a glass scan, not just a glass stare. The most common glass cockpit training issue is screen watching — pilots whose eyes are anchored to the PFD or MFD rather than executing a disciplined cross-check between the displays, the backup instruments, and the outside visual environment.
Fly partial panel regularly. Every pilot who primarily flies glass cockpit aircraft should be proficient at maintaining safe aircraft control on backup instruments alone. A simulator is an efficient environment for this work — it can be set up in any failure configuration repeatedly, without weather dependency.
Use the automation deliberately, not reflexively. Hand-fly for the early and late phases of flight where precision matters most, engage the automation in cruise where workload management benefits more from automation, and practice autopilot-off approaches regularly enough that the hand-flying skill stays current.
For student pilots in initial training, there is real value in at least some analog exposure early — not because glass cockpits are inferior, but because the scan habits that analog training forces are more easily developed before the glass display is available to bypass them. For pilots already flying glass who have not had substantial analog exposure, the prescription is to build partial panel proficiency into regular training. For pilots working toward professional careers, the industry expectation is fluency with glass cockpit avionics, because every regional airline and corporate flight department in the current market uses glass-panel aircraft.
The best-prepared pilot is not the one who has logged the most hours on any single panel type. It is the one who can walk into an unfamiliar cockpit, identify what is in front of them, and fly the airplane safely while they figure out the rest.
Glass cockpit aviation did not replace the need for stick-and-rudder skill, instrument scan discipline, or genuine airmanship. It added an entirely new layer of capability that now defines what competent instrument flying looks like in the professional world. The pilots who develop both will fly better, transition more smoothly, and arrive at each new aircraft with a broader foundation to build on.
Ready to put it into practice? Rent the Cirrus SR20 G6 or book the FAA-certified simulator at Falcon Field.
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