General Aviation Safety: Trained With Paper Maps, Flying With Digital Maps

Aviation is often seen as an innovative sector eager to seek technological solutions. It is often assumed that aircraft cockpits have panels with electronic displays and many buttons, some labeled "auto." While this might be the case for commercial aviation (Figure 1), the vast majority of noncommercial civil aircraft cockpits look nothing like these modern cockpits. Non-commercial civil aircraft, known as general aviation (GA), typically have cockpits that mainly consist of analog instruments that show the heading of the aircraft, the altitude, and the air speed (Figure 2). While flying, the pilots make calculations using a compass and an aviation calculator. Due to the slow entry rate of new, glass-cockpit aircraft [1], the composition of the GA aircraft fleet is not going to change any time soon.