Today, many military, commercial, and general aviation aircraft are using intelligent avionics with color displays and touchscreens instead of traditional flight gauges and knobs. Archangel Systems in Auburn, Alabama, has been a leader in intelligent avionics since 1992. They build some of the most sophisticated avionics in the world, employ all the latest microprocessors, and work with NASA on advanced cockpit display systems for aerospace. At the heart of all their electronic wizardry is a MicroTouch ClearTek capacitive touchscreen. Flying by Touch Kitty Greene, Ph.D. president of Archangel, says that in 1992 their engineers were searching for something that was different from the standard knobs and push buttons that have been used in cockpit instruments since the 1940s.
Most instruments come with huge manuals, and the knobs are cumbersome.
With our touchscreen systems, the pilot just touches the instrument icon on the screen. This brings up a menu or it changes the function. Let's just see if I can figure it out. Without an instruction manual, the pilot entered a flight plan from Atlanta to California in just two minutes. From the touchscreen, the pilot can see information, call up checklists, change backgrounds and looks, and enter information to calibrate or set instruments.