If someone knows the answer to this, please advise.
Why do these cargo aircraft need glass cockpits & all the latest high-tech avionics? What requirements are they trying to meet? I can understand why bombers & fighter aircraft have to be so advanced, but why does a cargo plane need all these expensive additions?
“Why do these cargo aircraft need glass cockpits & all the latest high-tech avionics?”
Well, none of these aircraft NEED glass cockpits or avionics (though many are designed from scratch with glass, so there’s no going back there). Having said that though, and having flown behind both varieties of technology over some 30+ years, a good “glass” package is way better than steam gauge tech.
IMHO, there is less maintenance, and greater fuel savings. This assumes the flight deck crew knows how, and is allowed to use the system to its fullest capabilities. A major airline went for years and years, before they allowed their crews to use the most beneficial capabilities of their fancy-schmancy glass packages. As to why? Standardization. It was a dumb move on the part of management, but that was their decision. I should add that the line pilots were quite embarassed by the short sightedness of their Chief Pilot’s office.
Additionally, it’s come to the point where the glass stuff is about the only game in town. My suspicion is that the price of this stuff continues to fall. I would suspect that packages with similar capabilities might actually be cheaper on the glass side. Once installed, they’ll save bucks due to increased reliability, and operational efficiency.
In addition to Habibbi's excellent response, may I add that it is cheaper to install several LCD displays with only a few wires going to a central computer than it is to install and run wires to several dozen separate instruments, each only monitoring one function.
The wiring is much simpler, the displays are more reliable, and the computer is more flexible in what gets displayed in which window and when. Glass cockpits enable things like moving map displays, weather radar displays, and engine performance displays to all exist in the same very limited real estate of the cockpit instrument panel.
There is also increased safety with a glass cockpit, because only the most basic engine parameters need to be represented on a glass panel, but if the computers detect a problem, the display can instantly change to display a detailed set of parameters for the suspect engine.
This is more important in newer aircraft, as the flight engineer position has been eliminated. There is no flight engineer position, for example, on the C-17. When the C-5M is modernized, I believe (although I'm not sure) that the flight engineer position will be eliminated there as well.
Also increasing safety is the ability for a glass cockpit display to show checklists to the aircrew, which is faster and easier than looking them up in a flipchart. Also the correct emergency checklist can be displayed automatically when an alarm is detected.
Besides, they just look cooler! C-5A cockpit vs. a C-5B AMP cockpit:
