Islands, Whales, Airplanes and Computers...
By Lane Wallace
October 2006
 I am being a recalcitrant student.
“Put the heading bug on the airport runway heading,” my friend Bruce says.
“Why?”
“That way you’ll know which way the runway heading is,” he answers.
“Or,” I reply, “I can just look at the compass.” To my way of thinking, if I can’t remember that I’m taking off on Runway 16, so that a straight-out departure means a heading of 160 degrees—or, for that matter, find my way back into this sleepy, island airport pattern in perfect VFR conditions without a bug on some instrument to remind me which way the runway’s pointing—they shouldn’t have given me a license.
Bruce sighs. It’s been a long morning, as he’s tried gainfully to get me to love the Garmin G1000 glass cockpit system in this brand-new Diamond DA-40 that he’s arranged for me to fly. I spent an hour in a simulator before even getting out to the airplane, just so I could learn how to use all the various switches, knobs and basic control keys required to operate the G1000 system—which turns a small airplane instrument panel into a computerized flat-panel display like those once found only in high-end business jets. There are precise digital tapes or indicators for airspeed, altitude, and all sorts of engine and aircraft parameters. There are multiple nav indicators, all nicely color-coordinated and integrated into a single instrument. There are pages and pages of information on aircraft systems, airports, weather and frequencies. Terrain alerts. Traffic alerts, although those aren’t all that reliable. Wind indicators. Airspace indicators. Trend indicators for every possible form of movement in the book, from rate of turn and airspeed to altitude and GPS track. If I had the patience to find it, I’m sure it would even tell me which FBO had the best vending machines.
It’s an amazing system. And while the normal check-out for the G1000, Bruce tells me, involves a day and a half of ground school, that’s not so surprising. The FlightSafety ground school for the glass cockpit system in the Challenger 604 I flew a few years ago took more than three days. All that technology takes some work to master.
But if you’re flying a Challenger 604—or doing the kind of cross-country hard IFR that a Challenger is built to do—all that technology also makes sense. Challenger pilots, after all, don’t spend a lot of time looking out the window. Their world is the instrument panel. And anything manufacturers can do to make that world more akin to the invisible one outside—more intuitive, more visual, more informative and more integrated—makes an IFR pilot’s job far easier. On this particular day, however, I wasn’t trying to fly IFR cross-country. I’d gone to Seattle for a briefing on Microsoft’s newest version of its Flight Simulator product, and I’d ended up with a free day to do some exploring. It was that glorious, short time of year known as the Pacific Northwest Summer, when the spigots finally turn off for a few weeks, the sun comes out and—if you’d never been advised of the region’s typical weather, which allows the Seattle Rain Festival to open September 15th and continue through July 4th—you’d quit your job, hock everything and move there immediately. It’s no-kidding, honest-to-goodness that beautiful. I’d also heard reports that some pods of Orca whales had been spotted in the vicinity. So I contacted my friend Bruce, who flight instructs out of Galvin Flight Service at Boeing Field, to see if we could take a low-level fun flight up to the San Juan Islands for lunch and look for whales along the way.
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