Some Cirrus Perspective

Today I was flipping through the newest blog entries in my Google Reader and came across a few posts about the new Cirrus Perspective - a G1000 in the Cirrus!

I was fairly surprised by it, not because it was totally unexpected, but because I expected them to put out a full FADEC engine setup first. The ability to do a simple push button start to crank the engine and never having to make a mixture setting change seems right up Cirrus' alley.

I have read about the Cirrus being used as a test bed for FADEC and expected them to announce it going into production before too long [1] [2]. Messing with the engine systems is probably a time consuming change though, as you don't want to screw that up.

So what does this new Perspective package offer, beyond the $50,000 price premium? First off - the Garmin G1000. An incredibility capable glass panel setup that now includes virtual terrain graphics (is that pointless?) and HITS (highway in the sky) tech. Plus that terrific Garmin autopilot.

I have only flown behind that autopilot once, the one time I flew behind a G1000 in the Columbia 350, and found it very nice. I did find use for the FLC (flight level change) feature that holds a given airspeed (instead of vertical speed). It is apparently called IAS on the Cirrus, which is a better name in my opinion - not coming from the big iron where it is called FLC.




My impressions of the new Cirrus setup, based on the videos and pictures:

  • The fake wood paneling is cheesy
  • It looks shoe-horned in. They were smart to go with larger 12" screens, but it appears they had to fudge with the cockpit panel to make it fit. Looks a like hacky to me. But hey, that's what the G4 will be for!
  • The vertical panel by the pilot's knee also looks a little strange. For one thing, pressing one of those little buttons in the alphabet cluster is likely to be hard in light chop, and they had to put a blank panel in at the bottom to fill up the space (they try not to show that in the PR materials too much). As an aside - why are airplane keyboards alphabetical instead of QWERTY? The computer geek in me doesn't like that. :)
  • While I find the G1000 much harder to use than the Avidyne, I think this is a good move. Primarily because Garmin is actually continuing the innovate, whereas we have seen little from Avidyne. And the G1000 is far more integrated, so while some functions are harder to find, new keypads and updated software can fix all that over time.
  • I definitely like the new environmental controls. They are electric which means changing the temperature should be easier. In the G2 I flew you had to fudge with that dial a good bit to get the heat/cool setting you wanted.
  • Hopefully this new package will soon become the norm and cause the Avidyne models to get cheaper! Then I can pick one up! :)

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