For those not familiar, avionics is just a broad term to refer to communication and navigation radios along with their cockpit displays. There are many, many options for avionics but in the end it just depends on your “mission”.

Is the aircraft for flying clear of clouds where the ground is visible at all times? If so this is known as flying by Visual Flight Rules (VFR) and all you need is a single communication radio and in some airspace, not even that. This approach is quite limiting since the weather needs to be acceptable not only at the departure point, but enroute and the destination as well. On the plus side, this is by far the cheapest option.

At the other extreme is aircraft capable of being flown solely by reference to aircraft instruments. This is known as flying by Instrument Flight Rules (IFR). The aircraft is equipped with far more avionics and almost everything must be duplicated twice for redundancy. Weather, to a degree, is less of a concern. The down side is, this stuff can get expensive fast!

When last I flew general aviation aircraft we had a basic “6 Pack”, and a “radio stack”. Today most everything is combined into a single Multi-Function Display (MFD). Today, most aircraft will commonly be equipped with two or more MFDs for redundancy. Use the slider on the photos below to compare old versus modern panel design.

Most of the communication and navigation radios are “remote mounted” elsewhere in the aircraft such as the firewall, wing root, tail cone, etc. and simply connected via a data cable to the MFD freeing up a lot of panel space.

Today’s MFDs can also display a myriad of other data. Nearby aircraft (TCAS), weather (SIRIUS XM), predicted glide distance and closest airport, terrain (synthetic vision), man made obstacles (synthetic vision), airspace, and much more.

In fact, the MFD can even display things like engine and propeller RPM, exhaust gas temperature (EGT), cylinder head temperature (CHT), fuel flow, fuel pressure, fuel used, fuel quantity, oil pressure, oil temperature,… You get the picture. Literally everything you could ever need or want can be displayed on the MFD.