Suddenly we’re feeling our age. Can it really be 21 years since the first Garmin integrated flight deck—the G1000—was announced for use in the Cessna Mustang? Amazingly, it has been that long that pilots have been able to fly a general aviation aircraft containing a large collection of computers that were able to talk to each other, present virtually everything the pilot needed to know about the airplane and its flight—weather, navigation, engine health, system operations, pitch, bank, airspeed, altitude—on an understandable collection of screens on the panel.
On top of that, the panel was integrated with an autopilot that could be programmed to follow a three-dimensional route displayed on those screens.