Gaining Perspective in Integrated Avionics
at Cirrus

By Robert Goyer
Photographed by Cirrus Design Corporation
August 2008

Click here to see additional photos of the Cirrus Perspective by Garmin

That is, until now. In late May Cirrus officially launched the new flat-panel avionics suite for its SR22 piston single, Perspective, by Garmin.

In April Cirrus gave Flying a sneak peak at Perspective. The package, which is technically a cockpit upgrade, will be a $48,000 option available only on its top trim level SR22 G3 piston single. Cirrus will continue to offer the current Avidyne Entegra flat-panel based system to customers who want it.

Perspective is not, Cirrus is emphatic to point out, a G1000 system. While utilizing many of the underlying technologies that Garmin employed to bring G1000 to the marketplace a few years ago, the new system was developed specifically to Cirrus' specifications.

As you might know, it's common practice for the makers of high-end bizjets to create a brand identity for the avionics packages they spec and tweak, sometimes extensively. Gulfstream with its PlaneView suite and Dassault with its EASy package on its Falcon bizjets, for example, have shaped the Honeywell Primus Epic-based avionics packages to create their own visions of the ideal avionics offering. Along the way they work closely with the avionics manufacturer to modify the layout of the components, the symbology on the displays, the size and position of the panels and the logic of the user interface. The changes in both cases were extensive and painstakingly thought out.

On a smaller scale, this is precisely what Cirrus has done with its new brand, Perspective. And in the end, the product is within shouting distance in functionality to packages offered on some of the latest bizjets, and at a small fraction of the cost.

The Suspense and the Payoff
Shortly after the Sun 'n Fun Fly-In, I traveled up to the shores of Lake Superior to visit with Cirrus Design at its Duluth, Minnesota, headquarters. All I knew was that I would be flying an airplane with a new avionics package, which they would neither confirm nor deny was made by a company whose name began with a "G." What would this new panel be? And how would it be different than the system in previous Cirrus airplanes, a flat-panel package anchored by Avidyne Entegra displays paired with Garmin GNS 430 navigators?

Room for Enhancement?
Avionics, like just about everything else having to do with the SR22, is a subject of endless controversy among Cirrus drivers. Many of them, like me, are fans of the Entegra system, an elegant, powerful, capable and readily expandable system that does a lot and asks little in return.

That said, there are shortcomings to the previous system. For starters, the MFD is not reversionary -- that is, if the primary flight display were to fail, the multifunction display, used mainly to show maps, flight plans and engine instruments, can't take over the PFD's job. You need to revert to the backup flight instruments. On the same lack of redundancy note, there's only one attitude heading reference sensor (AHRS) in the Entegra, and if that were to fail, you'd likewise be left with the steam gauges. And the system relies on the S-Tec 55X autopilot, which pales in comparison in terms of performance and features to the Garmin GFC 700 digital autopilot. (But more on the benefits of the 55X in a bit). Finally, Cirrus' backup electrical system in the Avidyne PFD system is, frankly, underpowered and requires a good deal of load shedding if the primary alternator were to quit.

So, as nice as the existing system was and is, there was without argument room to add safety and new features to the SR22 cockpit. And the company chosen for the job, on the strength of its immensely popular G1000 avionics systems (now standard equipment in more than a dozen airplanes from light singles to jets), was Garmin.

A New Direction
So in all honesty, it was no shocker when Cirrus showed me Perspective. The eye opener was that it was so ambitious a system for a small airplane.

Perspective, in some ways, is an apt name for the system, as two of the major new features -- synthetic vision and the larger displays -- are all about seeing more and seeing better.

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.

Moreover, Perspective airplanes have an upgraded electrical system, with the same dual alternators as on previous SR22s, but with the secondary one having an output of a very respectable 70 amps. With this scenario, if one alternator were to fail, the other could pick up all of the slack. You would probably want to turn off the air conditioner and the fan. Hardly the stuff of hairy emergencies.

As in high-end Garmin integrated systems, such as on the Mustang, the GFC 700 digital autopilot is controlled by a dedicated control device, which with Perspective is located below the keypad on the console. The range of options with the GFC 700 is impressive, as we've written many times before, and the performance is excellent, rock solid and silky smooth, if you can imagine an autopilot being both at the same time. Pilots can select different modes on the autopilot, including vertical speed or indicated airspeed mode (which on a small airplane is a better name for it than FLC -- for "flight level change" -- it seems to me).

I've flown with the GFC 700 before, so the autopilot was nothing new, even if some of the labels (IAS instead of FLC and the addition of the LVL button) are different. For pilots new to the GFC 700, the addition of more modes and the easier logic -- no arming is necessary -- will make the new autopilot a pleasure to use. And I found the jet-style roller control for indicated airspeed and vertical speed adjustments to be much more intuitive and easier to use than the "nose up" and "nose down" buttons on most G1000 systems.

There's also something new to the SR22 world, a yaw damper. On all previous SR22s, the lack of rudder trim coupled with a powerful engine requires a lot of right leg work on departure. The yaw damper eliminates the need for such exercise, while keeping autopilot turns, especially at lower airspeeds, silky smooth. Best of all the yaw damper -- as its name implies -- automatically moves the rudder to damp the Dutch roll induced by turbulence.

The GFC 700 can be coupled to all vertical nav modes, from cruise descent to WAAS vertical guidance approaches to ILSes. The autopilot will also fly your holding patterns and procedure turns for you, getting the entry right every time.

One GFC 700 panel feature is sure to be controversial: a single button that Cirrus Design calls the "level" button but which pilots will surely be referring to as the "panic" button. And to be frank, that is the purpose of the button. One push of the blue LVL button and the autopilot levels the wings and holds the current altitude, which you have to admit is a much better place to troubleshoot control problems than in a 90-degree banked dive. When confronted with loss, or near loss, of control, this button is a response one step more conservative than the chute, and there's a lot to be said for that. A number of jet fighters have such a feature that has probably given some hotshot jet jockey who was momentarily confused while upside down at night or in the clouds a chance to figure out what is going on.

Flight Planning
Flight planning on the new system is much improved, mostly because the increased real estate on the MFD allows you to see both the flight plan utility and a decent-sized moving map at the same time on the same screen. Plus, you can now do something you couldn't on the Entegra screen: pan ahead. Unlike the Avidyne multifunction display, Perspective's MFD has a cursor you can use to pan ahead as far as you'd like, and even add flight legs, if you want. Pilots who own a Garmin portable navigator already have this feature available, and if they're like me, they use it all the time.

This is, of course, in addition to the much improved speed of entering a flight plan, which you can now do using the alphanumeric keypad. Crackberry addicts out there will find that it takes a while to get used to the alphabetical (as opposed to qwerty) keypad, though old hands with FMSes won't blink an eye. There's also an improved stored flight plan function, victor airway routing, improved flight plan management and more. Nice.

On my hour-and-a-half-long flight in a Perspective-equipped SR22, we made our way up to Hibbing from Duluth, flew an RNAV approach there, and missed the approach into the hold. After that, we flew the return trip to Duluth, though along the way we lost the PFD (on purpose, of course) and used the MFD in reversionary mode, simulated a loss of control of the airplane and used the LVL button to regain our equilibrium. Flying the ILS back into Duluth (under actual conditions, by the way) showed the power of the SVT to provide situational awareness. I was flying the localizer and glideslope indicators, but even though the runway was behind the clouds, I was looking right at it, runway numbers, markings and all, on the display right before my eyes.

My impression? Simple: Pilots are going to love this system.

The SR22 with Perspective should be fully certified and available by the time you read this. A full-up Perspective-equipped GTS-X model, with turbocharging, air conditioning, TKS and more, goes for right around $640,000. And based on the historical tendencies of Cirrus buyers, that's exactly the airplane they're going to want.

For more details about the new system, visit cirrusdesign.com.

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