Glass Cockpit

Ok, so I finally bit the bullet and took my first flight in a glass cockpit. I didn't get off the ground though: all this was done at West Valley Flying Club's Frasca G1000 simulator. It's set up to act like a 172, and except for a rather soggy feeling on landing it does a pretty good job.

I figured glass would be fun, but haven't yet decided between the Garmin suite (which would lock me into the Cessna fleet at WVFC) and the older and less sophisticated (but preferred by many) Avidyne (for the Cirruses). The Cessna's are cheaper to fly and give me access to a six-seater when I want to (they have a C206), but the Cirrus is of course faster and cooler and has the CAPS thing (I know, the jury is still out on that one, but I can tell you that without that I wouldn't go flying over rough terrain at night).

Turns out glass IS fun! It's actually easier to fly than many articles I've read would suggest, except for the altitude indicator: somehow, I find it a lot more comfortable to see the distance to the ground at a glance by looking at the small dial on a regular gauge. The numbers just don't do it for me. Everything else though is pretty cool, and very helpful for instrument flight in particular. I love the structure of the Garmin system - good 'architecture', as my flight instructor told me, and I agree: you know what to expect pretty much every time you push a button or turn a knob. There are a few points to do better, though, and I'll mention them here in case someone has a better way of doing this.

The first is the timer. It irritates me that it doesn't remember the 1:00 minute countdown after it has run to zero and I reset it. It means I have to dial in 1:00 again every time I want to use a 1 minute countdown timer (quite common, right?), and dialing it in is a little cumbersome.

The second is the way to input frequencies in the standby field (from, say, the 'Nearest' page). After you've picked an airport you need to choose Menu, then pick 'Frequency window', then click enter, and then point to the frequency and then hit enter again to load it in the standby window. Clearly, if you have an approach chart on your lap you'll just dial it in! A shame, as it is a useful feature that should be a lot easier to use.

That's it really. I liked it a lot otherwise, and even though my first ILS was a little wobbly on the glide slope (remember, I had not done this for a while) I felt quite comfortable with the whole system after about 1 hour of fussing around with it on the ground, and one hour of flying.

Interesting tidbit on the sim: when we were flying to Stockton and had about 15 minutes to go, I asked if we could speed this up a little (saving $, right?), and because my instructor didn't really know how to do that, he gave me a 200kt tail wind. The fun thing was that my airspeed dropped to 0 and I stalled almost to the ground, because of the sudden tail wind! That's what a 200kt wind shear will do for you!

My second go at the sim was more focused on instrumetn flying. I did a GPS and had to go missed, then did a VOR (to slightly lower) but had to go missed again, then did the ILS but the glideslope gave up halfway, so I could only go down to the localizer MDA and had to go missed again. Finally, the GS was up and running again, but I made a classic mistake when entering the hold over the VOR in a parallel entry, turning right (away from the hold) where I should have turned left. I am sure I wouldn't have made that mistake if the GPS was working, but it had mysteriously failed as well, and I was back to flying the needles only. No excuse, of course, quite a serious mistake that could be deadly, especially because I was really lost when I was heading in the right direction (ILS inbound) but completely off the scale on the localizer. Being lost is never a good idea with your windscreen full of cloud.

Anyway, I figured it out, did another turn in the hold and flew an uneventful ILS to minimums, and this time I broke out just in time for a nice landing in Stockton. Good lessons learned, and a couple more approaches 'on glass' under my belt.

I am looking forward to my first real flight in a 172 with the G1000, probably in about two weeks.