As far as I know, the Widget Component works by taking the rendertarget output from a Slate Canvas (the root element in a UMG Widget), and applying that to a world-space plane, providing the necessary utilities and functionality to map worldspace(3d) clicks into widgetspace(2d) user input.
You could do like you’re already doing and add a Widget Component to each of your cockpit’s MFDs, positioned over the display, and that would simply work. Or you could go digging in the wiki and the forums for topics on rendertargets and attempt to write your own system to map the render output from a UMG widget to a mesh of your choosing.
As far as having the information update in real time, simply have the actor containing the widget pipe the necessary information to the widget via event calls or setting variables on the UMG instance.