Despite what might be teasing, I am deadly serious when I say I have great concerns about the current avionics and the pilots that use them without developing positional awareness skills. Jerry's points are all correct and valid, but the guys flying the fancy obxes today fly the magental line and if you turn the box off, despite having everything but the pretty picture these guys have become so mentally lazy they have no clue where they are relative to anything.

The Cirrus is the proof. That plane has the best available avionics and a lousy safety record.

The stuff today is great, but unless a pilot develops positional awareness skills, he will be exactly like the 757 crew that flew into the mountain in Columbia because they punched in the wrong identifier, and followed the magenta line right into the side of a mountain. They were not mentally verifying what the pretty picture was showing.