Pilots checking out the flight deck of the Eclipse 500 may notice something missing. The very light jet has no traditional standby instruments. That’s because they’re incorporated into the machine’s 15-inch multifunction display, which itself sits between the left and right PFDs. The standby data–airspeed, attitude, altitude and heading–appear on a compact four-inch square display, replicating the larger PFDs.

So won’t the standbys disappear if the MFD fails? No: there are multiple levels of redundancy built into the aircraft’s electronic architecture, and even if all else fails, including both engine-driven generators, automatic load shedding will ensure that vital systems, including the standby package, will continue to operate for at least 30 minutes on just one of the airplane’s two batteries.