Cessna Turbo Skylane
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Lying beyond a series of ridges in high country, an airport like Marfa, Texas, can be a hazardous destination in low weather or at night.
Albuquerque Center gave us a climb to 9,000 feet for terrain, but we chose instead to cancel and descend so we could try out the synthetic vision utility.
As you can see from the accompanying photograph on page 2 of this article, the utility is amazing.
This isn’t the first time I’ve flown with SVT, but it is the first time I’ve had the chance to fly with it in and around some serious terrain. Overall, SVT is very nicely implemented, the symbology is big and easy to interpret, and the colors are bright and vibrant. It’s also remarkably intuitive to work with. While there is a lot of capability built into the system, you don’t need to know every little feature in order to be able to use it.
Take our flight as a case in point. While Chris hand-flew the airplane, I took some photographs of the PFD as we approached the ridgelines, always leaving ourselves several easy and unambiguous outs. As we flew nearer the ridge and the terrain came closer to our altitude, the rendering of that high terrain on the synthetic vision display began to change color, at first to yellow, when it was a threat but still below us. Seconds later, as we approached terrain that was higher than us, the terrain on the SVT changed to red, and visual warnings were displayed on both screens and an additional warning was made over the airplane’s audio system. It would have been very difficult indeed to have missed the message.
Even though it seems to do everything that a Class B TAWS system does and then some, SVT doesn’t qualify as a Class B system in the Skylane. Even so, with SVT there really isn’t any need for TAWS B, which is an $8,500 option.
In this case, of course, we were VFR, in the clear, aware of exactly where we were and where we were going, so the SVT demonstration was just that, a demonstration. But under conditions where the chips were down and you needed all the help you could get to keep from flying into that ridgeline, SVT is the best avoidance technology that I’ve seen. There’s just no ambiguity. What you see on the screen is what you would see out the windscreen. It goes without saying that synthetic vision is not intended for use as a primary reference; it’s purely advisory in nature.
But it’s not hard to imagine the multiple scenarios in which the utility could save the day: losing reference to the horizon; accidental VFR into IMC; getting lost at low altitude in areas of high terrain. I don’t have to name them: You can probably think of a few recent tragic mishaps that fit these descriptions pretty closely.
What’s even easier to imagine is a scenario whereby SVT simply helps you stay on top of more typical situations: any night flight at all, but especially those in areas with high terrain; extended flights over water; flights into airports in very nondescript geographic locales. You might not need SVT to save your life in these situations, but it’s an invaluable tool to help things go more smoothly. And "more smoothly," we’ve all come to learn, translates fairly directly into "more safely."
Same Old Skylane
After passing the ridges and descending slightly, I loaded the GPS overlay approach for Runway 30 at Marfa into the navigator and headed in. WAAS wasn’t any help here, but in more and more cases, you can find approaches with vertical guidance to remote airports just like this.
The wind was blowing strong at Marfa, 10 gusting to 20, conditions that I’m guessing are common there. I hadn’t been in a Skylane for a few years, but despite the gusty conditions, it felt like second nature. The 182 is an airplane you fly with trim, and if you trim it right, it’s a pussy cat. With the gusty conditions and a good deal of wind shear on final, I kept a few extra knots in on final, a sentiment that Chris seconded, and we touched down well past the numbers but still using up relatively little runway in the process, even with the faster-than-standard approach speed and the use of just one notch of flaps.
This much hasn’t changed, at least. The manners of the Skylane are great, predictable, harmonious and comfortable. It’s an airplane that many thousands of pilots have fallen in love with, and it’s easy to see why.
Except for the wind, which was raising a chorus of creaks around the old T-hangars, things were very quiet in Marfa as we taxied in. Rudy, the attendant at the lone FBO, Howard Petroleum, gave us the keys to a loaner car and we trundled into town for a fantastic Mexican lunch at Conchita’s.
Flying High
After we got back from lunch and an impromptu self-guided tour of downtown Marfa in our ’80s-vintage Pontiac, we had the Skylane topped off, though we didn’t actually need to. With 87 gallons of fuel, the Skylane has huge range.
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