Originally Posted by
MD83FO
Will airline avionics ever catch up to general aviation advancements?
No. Because of certification requirements, cost, problems with commonality and the time between design freeze and the first customer getting their hands on it.
My glider has better instruments than the 777 I fly for work. It has 1,000x the memory in the FMC-equivalent, to start with. The outlay to upgrade an airliner avionics suite to tech that is only 10 years old as opposed to 30 is so eye watering that it is rarely done. iPads have augmented a lot of the functionality of the aircraft in a way that would be prohibitively expensive and/or plain impossible conventionally.