Search Results for: Garmin G1000

Most pilots like to think they do pretty well at the whole flying thing. In fact, surveys show that overall most people rate themselves as above average in performance. This is obviously impossible, as half of all pilots would have their performance rated as less than average. In his new book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell looks […]

Sun ‘n Fun kicked off Tuesday at Central Florida’s Lakeland Linder Regional Airport, and the event was marked by a number of interesting announcements and even some significant new product launches. Epic announced a pair of new to-be-certified jets, Piper was showing off its Meridian, now equipped with Garmin G1000 glass, and Avidyne announced its […]

Theres no question ours is an era of great advances in safety and position awareness. Its the rare IFR airplane that isnt equipped with at least a portable, moving-map GPS; theres not an IFR-certified airplane in production that doesnt include a GPS-driven “glass cockpit” as at least an option-one thats almost always added. The capability of GPS comes with great complexity. There are very different operating interfaces with units from competing manufacturers. Its a little surprising, then, that pilots seem to make the same errors and omissions pretty much regardless of the unit involved. What are these common GPS errors? What can we do to avoid them? David Zitt is the Flight School Manager of Sportys Academy, the flight instruction arm of Sportys Pilot Shop in Batavia, Ohio. He and his instructor staff work exclusively in GPS-equipped airplanes, some with full “glass cockpit” panels but most conventional round-gauge airplanes meeting the definition of Technologically Advanced Aircraft (TAA) through the installation of moving-map GPS. Zitt notes that “each [GPS] unit has its own pitfalls,” but finds common pilot mistakes regardless of the type of GPS installed. Prime among them is “instrument fixation” during the transition to TAA flight, a focused stare and excessive concentration on which button to push when the pilot is not completely familiar with the GPS used.

Late last year Embraer earned FAA certification for its Phenom 100 very light jet. Deliveries were expected to begin immediately. Based on the unofficial 10,000-pound cutoff for the very light jet segment, the twinjet is technically a VLJ. But with the largest cabin in the segment and a top speed of 390 knots, it’s also […]

It was a cruddy day to go mountain flying. A ragged gray overcast stretched over Western Washington State, high enough to make for good VFR under the deck near Spokane, but it promised to be a more complicated journey to the east, where the spine of the Bitterroots juts out, rising to 10,000 feet at […]

Les Abend is a well-trained airline pilot who gets comprehensive recurrent training, who is bound by extensive government and company regulations, and who never flies his Boeing without a well-qualified second pilot and without concurrence of a dispatch system. It goes without saying that the capabilities of his airplane outstrip what most of us fly […]

Most turbine airplanes have three-screen panels, with a PFD for both front seats. In the event the pilots-side PFD dies he/she is expected to continue using the PFD on the other side of the airplane, although the option of manually selecting PFD information on the center screen always exists as well. Pilots brought up flying traditional round-gauge IFR might not even consider the reversionary mode to be “partial panel” at all. This valuable feature makes partial panel flying easy…if the partial panel results from failure of the PFD hardware. Because it is an important advance in ease of flight in the case of primary flight instrument failure (i.e., those directly in front of the pilot), it gets top billing as a safety advantage of glass cockpit airplanes. Except for a little parallax (viewing the instrument from the side, not head-on) everything is exactly as it normally appears for the partial-panel flyer, and all functions (including the autopilot) remain fully operable. The biggest difference is that large-scale moving map, engine and fuel management, checklists, charts and other functions are relegated to a small window in the corner of the most recent-model MFDs when in reversionary mode, and are not available at all in some earlier installations. Pilots who grow too dependent on these functions, or who eschew paper checklists and navigational charts in favor of electronic versions on the “big screen” will find themselves outside their comfort zones in the event of a PFD hardware failure.

Last year when Bend, Oregon, company Columbia Aircraft exhausted its last gasp efforts at getting enough cash to stay in business and declared bankruptcy, there was immediate speculation that Cessna would buy the company’s assets at auction. As it turned out, Cessna had been looking at that possibility for some time already. And by the […]

Frasca International in Urbana, Illinois, has received an FAA contract to develop and build a flight training device (FTD) for the Cessna Citation Mustang light jet. Frasca is a world leader in FTDs, and the Level 5 unit for the Mustang is to be delivered to the FAA’s Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center in Oklahoma City. […]

Could an airplane hit the bull’s-eye more squarely in today’s environment than the TBM 850? I don’t see how. The turboprop single burns about half again as much fuel as a typical piston twin, but it flies at least 100 knots faster on that fuel. And its range easily stretches out over 1,200 nm even […]