My trip home from Oshkosh last week offered an enlightening contrast between “old” and “new” aviation technologies, and a lesson in how best to integrate the two in the same cockpit. While my colleagues at Flying scored rides home in Citation and Falcon bizjets that I’m sure were outfitted with some fairly sophisticated gear, I made the 670 nm trip from Wittman Regional Airport (KOSH) to my home base in Morristown, New Jersey (KMMU) at the controls of a bare-bones Cessna 172N – one of my flying club’s airplanes, a 1978-vintage Skyhawk that lacks an autopilot and also flies a little crooked, making it necessary to apply a small amount of right rudder in cruise to keep the ball centered.
The most modern piece of equipment in this airplane is a Garmin GNS 430 navigator, which I realized as I headed east toward New Jersey has slipped from the “new” avionics category into the “old” – or at least “older.” Garmin doesn’t even make the GNS 430 anymore since it replaced this excellent unit with the even better GTN 650 touchscreen navigator.
