The Digital Cockpit of the Future How Human Machine Interface Technology Will Impact Avionics Displays W hen Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken lifted off Earth in a SpaceX rocket in May 2020, there were a lot of firsts: it was the first manned rocket launch on American soil since the shuttle program ended in 2011, the first NASA flight with a private company, and the first time a space shuttle cockpit looked completely different to anything we've ever seen before. The human-machine-interfaces (HMI) of airplane cockpits will soon follow the same path. New technologies like 3D volumetric displays or virtual tactile sensation projections offer exciting possibilities for the cockpit of the future. Yet new tools will be necessary to develop, test and integrate those technologies in an economically sensible and safe way. Robert L. Behnken, better known as Bob Behnken, has spent a lot of time in space. He first flew to the International Space Station (ISS) in March 2008 with the space shuttle Endeavour and took a second trip in 2012. Then the space shuttle program ended and Behnken had to wait eight years before he could return to the ISS. When he launched in SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule on May 30, 2020, everything around him had changed. While spaceship cockpits already looked like the future 6 mobilityengineeringtech.com Aerospace & Defense Technology, August 2022http://www.mobilityengineeringtech.com