Search Results for: Garmin G1000

The University of North Dakota’s Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences will take delivery of six more Cessna 172 Skyhawks next month. That makes 44 new Cessnas UND will have received within 18 months. The UND Skyhawks will come equipped with the Garmin G1000 avionics suite. UND operates a fleet of 116 aircraft, including eight helicopters. […]

It was odd that, as I taxied out in the number three prototype of the Diamond D-Jet, the last thing on my mind was that there is only one engine. As with any other business jet you can’t see the engines, and the sounds and sensations of one jet engine spinning away are the same […]

Most pilots know Sporty’s for its famous “Pilot Shop” mail-order pilot supply business. But for more than 20 years, Sporty’s has been not only a place where you can buy “Learn to Fly Here!” signs, but also a place where aspiring pilots can learn to fly. Sporty’s founder and chairman, Hal Shevers, was a flight […]

It was one of those fine, late-fall, California desert nights: velvety-black, moonless and calm. The 182 took off from the North Las Vegas Airport bound for Rosamond, California, which is in the Mojave Desert about 70 miles north of Los Angeles. The pilots aboard, two ATPs who had logged between them 53,000 hours in military […]

Raise your hand if you haven’t performed a weight- and- balance check since your last certificate check ride, or checking out in a new airplane. I have, but I admit that’s mostly because older Beech Bonanzas (such as mine) are easily loaded with their center of gravity too far aft. And to boot, because even […]

Electronic flight displays-glass cockpits in the modern vernacular-were a novelty just six years ago. Then all at once, it seems, they were everywhere. Every new airplane is delivered equipped with some kind of glass and older airframes are seeing retrofits. Steam gauges are still in the majority, but theres enough glass out there to pose this question: Is it really better? More important, is glass actually more reliable and safer? Lacking a detailed blind study, a take-it-to-the-bank answer isnt possible and would, in any case, be subject to debate. So we did the next best thing. We joined with our sister publication, Aviation Consumer, and surveyed more than 300 owners and operators of various types of EFIS displays. Via an online survey published by our news service, www.avweb.com, we asked owners to evaluate the very idea of electronic displays compared to conventional iron gyros and analog pitot-static instruments. Is the glass easier to use? Do owners like the displays? Whats the maintenance like? And above all, do these sophisticated but relatively untried systems inspire the confidence necessary to charge off into the gray innards of hard IMC? Both of our magazines have received e-mails complaining about system failures, and more than one of these has claimed reliability is worse than the industry claims. If this were true, we reasoned, our survey would turn up a substantial number of complaints. It didnt. While owners did report glass failures and several pilots reported more than one failure, there was no widespread pattern related to poor reliability.

I admit it, I’m spoiled. For a 33-year-old airplane my Cessna Cardinal RG is very well equipped. Fitted with a Garmin (née UPS) GNS 480 navigator, a Garmin GMX 200 multifunction display and an S-Tec System 30 autopilot with a Pitch Stabilization System, my airplane doesn’t give up a whole lot to the new kids […]

Back in 1989, businessman Wally David made an interesting observation: Computer graphics technology was improving so dramatically that a whole new realm of simulator training was about to become possible. With the new graphics technology, a non-moving Flight Training Device (FTD) might be able to provide a realistic sensation of movement simply by incorporating high-quality, […]

A few months after Cirrus announced it had chosen Garmin to provide avionics for production versions of its developmental Vision light jet, L-3 Avionics Systems’ legal department has reacted. L-3 had been on board with Cirrus as the avionics provider in the early stages of the Vision single-engine-jet project with L-3’s SmartDeck integrated suite. According […]

Whenever new pilots ask me to suggest a first airplane to learn to travel in, the Cessna 182 Skylane is always at the top of my list. My recommendation of the Skylane is especially strong for a pilot new to IFR flying. Part of the reason I believe so firmly in the value of the […]