As I have noted many times, the advances that have taken place in piston airplane development over the past 25 years have been portable. New avionics, better interiors, more powerful engines, improved propellers and even air conditioning can usually be installed in an existing airplane, as well as a newly manufactured one. This evolutionary process increased the value of existing airplanes by making it possible to make them nearly as good as new, but that era is now over. The glass cockpit, particularly Garmin's G1000 system, is an advancement so profound, and so integrated into the airplane, that it can deliver its full potential only when installed in an airplane as it is manufactured.
The reason the G1000 needs to be built into a new airplane is that it is so comprehensive. This system handles every avionics function, including advanced capabilities such as traffic and terrain warning and weather datalink, but also displays information about all critical non-avionics systems such as engine, fuel and electrical systems. An airplane is literally built around the G1000 and its capabilities, something that will be very difficult to do in the field with existing airframes.
We have already seen the same phenomenon in turbine airplanes where Honeywell's Primus Epic system, and Collins' Pro Line 21 suite, has assumed total cockpit management roles. Both avionics makers offer retrofit versions of their glass cockpit systems, but you just can't integrate all the functions into an existing airplane to anywhere near the same level as in a newly manufactured one.
This process of new avionics making existing airplanes obsolete, or at least significantly behind in technology, has been happening in jets for several years. I think the first example of an airplane that made a complete integrated avionics package a fundamental part of the airplane design was the Gulfstream IV, introduced in 1986. The Honeywell glass cockpit in the GIV is so advanced compared to anything that came before that no existing Gulfstream could ever be brought up to its standard. Gulfstream has done the same thing again with the PlaneView cockpit in the G550 that was recently certified.
But who could have expected this level of avionics capability and integration to reach the piston price level? Not me. At least not this soon. But Avidyne pioneered the glass cockpit in piston airplanes with Cirrus in the SR22 last spring, and Garmin has finished the job with its totally integrated G1000 entering service early this year.
Two major developments allowed the glass cockpit to become a piston reality sooner than I expected. The first was development of low-cost but very reliable and accurate attitude heading reference systems (AHRS). The glass part of the project-the displays-have been available at the right price for a number of years, but the holdup was an AHRS at the right price to replace the spinning rotor gyros. I knew that a number of companies were using sensor technology developed primarily for the automotive industry for traction and handling control systems to try to make a low-cost AHRS. Progress was very slow at first, and I became skeptical of success. But then several companies devised ways to use other information, such as airspeed, altitude and vertical speed, to enhance the low-cost sensors' performance. GPS and the earth's magnetic field are also supplying data to help the AHRS determine attitude.
