It never fails... there's always going to be someone to show up and say that aviation doesn't need any improvement; "we" figured out the best way to do everything in the 70s and 80s and everybody now just needs to "be a better pilot!"
The reality is that aviation has always been seeking better ways to convey information to the pilot in an intuitive manner, so he can spend less time computing and consciously interpreting, and more time making decisions. The gyroscopic attitude indicator we're all familiar with was developed because it gave better indication of aircraft attitude than relying on the pilot's interpretation of needle, ball, and airspeed. The VOR was developed because it gave better information and was more useful than a four-course range or NDB. Inertial navigation was more useful than sextant shots, even with its inherent drift. GPS has now provided positional awareness to everyone for a comparative pittance. This head-mounted HUD is just another step along that road. It takes the same information we already get from other instruments and just presents it in a more intuitive manner. It's as much a jump in user-friendliness over a traditional six-pack as the the six-pack is over a panel that looks like this:
Code:
Airspeed: 115
Pitch: +2
Roll: 2R
Altitude: 4921
Turn rate: 1R
Ball: .1L
Heading: 127
Climb: +98
That's the exact same information you get from a traditional six-pack, but would anyone here want to try flying in IMC with it? Of course not.
Now, if you had the means to reliably fly and navigate in hard IMC as easy as if you were VFR, would you take it? Ignoring cost, if a wearable HUD was at least as reliable as your traditional panel-mounted instruments (steam or EFIS), would you use it? If you could shoot an approach to minimums just like you fly the pattern on a nice Saturday morning, would you
really still want to fly a nonprecision approach (or even a raw-data ILS) on steam gauges instead?
Done right, a modern EFIS/HUD/wearable instrumentation package can and will offer far superior situational awareness, even after multiple failures or in a degraded mode, than you can get from a fully-operational traditional six-pack and a paper chart. We're already at the point where the failure of a properly-designed all-glass panel and electrical system is less likely than a simultaneous electrical and vacuum failure on a traditional panel. Why hobble ourselves?
On GPS dependency, I submit that the problem isn't the prevalence of GPS or the lack of "traditional" navigation teaching, but rather a lack of training in proper, responsible use of GPS. We like to pretend with students like GPS just doesn't exist, and we hammer into them that navigating like it's 1920 is the only way to navigate. It's like thinking kids will magically know how to handle alcohol (or firearms, or other activities with potentially serious consequences) if all their previous "instruction" in the matter has been to pretend that they don't exist. Is it any wonder they drop that as soon as they get their license?
I think it's time we accept that a sectional, pencil, and stopwatch is no longer the primary means of navigating. Primary instruction needs to stop pretending that GPS doesn't exist, and instead start teaching GPS-aided navigation in a responsible manner--because like it or not, we aren't going back. That means we spend less time on useless distractions like figuring groundspeed and wind from distance covered and time elapsed, and more time focusing on good pre-flight and in-flight decision making. The manual method goes from being the primary covers-all-bases navigation to what it really is these days--a backup method. If I'm flying a VFR cross-country, and I lose all of my GPS units (and many of us have several--tablet, smartphone, EFIS...), I'm not going to fiddle around with an E6B and a stopwatch. I'm going to use my last known position, which I know because I'm using my GPS responsibly and not just blindly following a line, to find a diversion airport. My mission isn't that important; I'll go land and figure things out on the ground.