Climbing into a Cirrus SR22 equipped with Avidyne’s Entegra Release 9 avionics system after spending three hours flying in the left seat of a Diamond DA40 fitted with Garmin’s G1000 cockpit felt like stepping onto the surface of another planet. Arrayed before me in the Cirrus were two large flat-panel displays presenting all the usual flight-related information as well as various knobs and buttons, but that’s about where the similarities between the systems ended. I may as well have been on Pluto.
Besides the much-appreciated extra elbowroom in the Cirrus, the Avidyne cockpit immediately struck me as being a more buttoned-down and business-like alternative to the Garmin system, with which I am exponentially more familiar. What I noticed first in the SR22 was the inclusion of what appeared to be an honest-to-goodness flight management system incorporating a QWERTY-style keypad. While some versions of G1000 include keypads, entering flight plan information in the DA40 I fly can be a chore involving copious knob twisting and button pressing to select individual letters or input new waypoints. This looked promising.
