Gaining Perspective in Integrated Avionicsat Cirrus
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Perspective at a Glance
• Displays: Two 12-inch diagonal high-resolution LCDs, one PFD and one MFD
• Attitude: Dual digital AHRS
• Power and Redundancy: Full automatic or manual reversionary capability for both displays; dual alternators (100 and 70 amps); dual buss, integrated caution messaging.
• Autopilot: Garmin GFC 700 digital autopilot with optional yaw damper. Standard features include indicated airspeed select, vertical speed select, a host of nav and approach modes, and a one-button wings-level altitude-hold recovery function.
• GPS Engine: Garmin WAAS receiver
• Data Entry: FMS keypad or concentric knobs
• MFD Features: Advanced flight planning, Garmin SafeTaxi, Garmin or Jeppesen electronic instrument charts, XM Weather, SkyWatch traffic avoidance, Stormscope and more.
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The synthetic vision part makes use of Garmin's brilliant SVT that is the same new display technology that Garmin customers Diamond, Cessna and Socata were showing off at Sun 'n Fun earlier this year. (See Mac's review of the utility in the July issue.)
But Cirrus argues that synthetic vision looks even better on the latest SR22 because the new displays are bigger than most Garmin displays, 12 inches as opposed to 10.4 diagonally. And it's hard to argue that point. The difference in screen size might not sound like much, but it is. In terms of real estate, it's an increase of 35 percent. When you sit in the new '22, the magnitude of the upgrade is clear. The displays take up nearly the entire height of the panel. And the MFD is now also angled toward the pilot more than before, giving the installation a more pilot-centric feel. With the larger displays there's more to see and the symbology can be larger and bolder. Based on my flying the system, it's clear that size does matter.
An Integrated Approach
The new Perspective "panel" actually starts way down on the console at the throttle lever (which itself is new) and extends upward and outward from there. The throttle features a "go-around" button, often referred to as a "takeoff/go-around," or TOGO button, located on the pilot's side of the throttle handle. This feature does a few very nice things for a pilot. Before takeoff, hitting the button sets the flight director command bars for you, so you know what attitude to fly on departure. More importantly, on go-around, the button gives you those same command bars for the go-around while automatically making the missed approach procedure the active leg of the flight plan. Of course you should already know what the procedure is, but if in doubt, just look at the MFD. It'll be right there for you. Even pilots who haven't used a TOGO button will find it useful, as I did.
You can still control most functions of the MFD at the display by using the knobs and buttons, but the good news is, you don't have to. Perspective has an FMS keypad for doing most chores, like creating and modifying the flight plan, entering frequencies and putting them into the active transceiver, calling up and activating approaches and more. This is better than using the concentric knobs to do your inputting, not only because it's faster to type in a value than to twist it in, but now you don't have to reach up to the display to do it or move to an entirely different box with a different interface. In most cases you can, in fact, make inputs without reaching at all, which is a huge ergonomic advance over the previous system. There are some frequent functions I couldn't figure out how to control from the keypad, including calling up charts and checklists on the MFD, two things I do a lot, and it's funny how much I noticed the slight reach to control the bezel knobs on the MFD when I'd been doing it for years without having noticed at all.
Flying a Perspective SR22
I've got a few hundred hours in Avidyne Entegra-equipped SR22s, so I felt qualified to take a look at just how much the new panel changes things. And let me say from the start that it changes things for the better in some very fundamental ways.
Over the past couple of years, I've also had the chance to fly no fewer than 11 G1000-equipped airplanes, everything from a Cessna 172 to a Citation Mustang. So I'm also quite familiar with Garmin's integrated avionics systems. If you are, too, you'll find that flying behind Perspective will be an easy transition.
Cirrus is accurate in saying that Perspective is not a G1000 system, at least not like any I've flown before. The large displays make seeing even the tiniest details much easier, and the autopilot/keypad/display integration is as good as on any airplane I've flown, including the Mustang. There are a few ways to do any task, using buttons on the keypad, the autopilot controller or the display bezels, and the location of the controls puts most functions right at your fingertips. It might not be effortless, but it's not far from it.
Autoflight and Redundancy
By their admission, one of the holdups with Cirrus going with a full-up Garmin panel was their attachment to the S-Tec 55X autopilot. For all of its shortcomings, the rate-based 55X did one thing an attitude-based autopilot can't do: fly along fat, dumb and happy after the loss of the attitude indicator. And when you're in actual instrument conditions, that's when you need all the help you can get.
Perspective was designed to overcome this one major safety shortcoming of attitude-based flight control systems. It has, as I mentioned before, dual AHRS, so even if one solid-state attitude indicator were to fail (a much less likely event than with steam gauges), the other one will kick in automatically and keep the autopilot flying happily along.
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