Three guesses what the "GX" stands for in the name of this new Mooney. The "G" gives it away. The airplane has the exciting new Garmin G1000 glass cockpit system that is revolutionizing the instrument panels of many new airplanes. Where the Mooney panel used to look small, with a lot of elements, it is now primarily two big screens, a primary flight display (PFD) on the left and a multifunction display (MFD) on the right. All navigation, communications and flying information is available in this integrated system.
Because Flying has had coverage of the G1000 system in other airplanes over the past several months, we'll look mainly at the differences in the system as it is installed in the Mooney Ovation2.
One difference is that the G1000 in the Ovation shows flaps and pitch trim positions on the MFD. The whole G1000 system lights up whenever the master switch is turned on and there is no separate avionics master switch. The system should be displaying XM WX downlinked weather on its MFD by the time you read this.
The G1000 system will talk to you in the Mooney. It'll call traffic either with the standard TIS system (with which it'll also tell you when traffic information is not available); it'll tell you to check the landing gear if the throttle is retarded with the gear up; and it will tell of an impending stall. As a nice touch, the pilot has the choice of a male or female voice for the advisories.
Even though the FAA requires only that essential equipment operate for 30 minutes after the failure of a charging system, Mooney has gone well beyond this requirement in its glass cockpit all-electric airplane. The Ovation2 has two separate full-size 24-volt batteries and two alternators. The second alternator is a 20-amp engine-driven unit from B&C Specialty Products that is finding its way onto a lot of new airplanes and that can be retrofitted to a lot of older airplanes. Twenty amps is enough, in the case of the Ovation2, to run the entire G1000 system off an emergency bus. When this is done, the battery circuit breaker is pulled and the two batteries are held in reserve for an arrival with everything playing.
