Thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets, touchscreens are now part of our daily lives, including in the cockpits of planes.

“Touchscreen allows for many advantages in the cockpit,” says Jean Christoph Monfret, Vice President, Avionics Display Solutions, Esterline, “It is a much easier to use human-machine interface.”

However, using touchscreens during turbulence has been one of the major challenges – at Paris Air Show, Esterline demonstrated new solutions which can combat this, including hand grips, force sensors and projected capacitive technology. Capacitive sensors are non-contact devices – the electrical current that passes from the finger to the machine activates “coupling” and allows the pilot to control the switch, even while wearing gloves.