Vectors To Final

This morning I took my wife K up for her first flight in over a year. She has her pilot's license, but with our 17 month old in the picture she has had little chance to get out to the airport. We took the G1000 C172 and just flew around the local area. We got some pictures of the new house we expect to close on tomorrow as well as other local landmarks. I was in the left seat and K was in the right seat. When it was her time to fly I put the G1000 in reversionary mode - to give her her own complete set of instruments. That's a very cool feature for that type of situation. However, after flying in rev mode for 15 minutes or so, I pushed the red button to go back to normal mode and - guess what - I found a bug in the G1000. A picture describes it best: Basically the PFD went back to normal operation but the MFD only partially recovered. The bottom soft keys remained in "rev" mode and the moving map would not come up. The ability to change "pages" never...

Today I went up with my instructor Tyson to get my Biannual Flight Review out of the way. This consists of an hour on the ground and in the air for him to make sure I generally know what I am doing with an airplane. We spent time going over some of the regs about minimum equipment needed to fly into certain airspace, as well as chart symbols on the sectionals (something I am always rusty on as I rarely use those charts). Then we hopped in the G1000 airplane to get our flight time in. We made a quick weather check before we took off because there is some cold weather coming in tonight - maybe the first snow of the season for us South Carolinians. But the clouds looked like they were just fine and would stay that way long enough for the flight. So we took off, headed South, and started some slow flight. After that I did a power on stall and Tyson demonstrated how much control you have with the rudder even when the airplane is stalled - it was pretty impressive. He also showed me how ...

Aero-news posted a few interesting items today: The mysterious case of Marcus Schrenker . It appears that Mr. Schrenker decided that bailing out of his turboprop aircraft and letting it fly away on autopilot was a great way to avoid his white-collar lawsuit. How do they know this? Well, there are a few pointers: 1) the way the radar track looked 2) the fact that a military aircraft eased up to his airplane in-flight (after trouble was reported) and found the cabin door open and the cockpit lights all dark 3) the fact that Childersburg, AL police think they gave Mr. Schrenker a ride to a hotel during the time frame - after he appeared in the town with a strange explanation of how he got there The flying penguin has his own unique perspective on this incident as well. Update Jan 14, 2009: Now the guy's busted ! ----- Next up are updates from Cirrus - they have revealed a new option for their 2009 line-up. FIKI (flight into known icing) will soon be approved on properly equippe...

I spent some time today learning about the latest offerings from Avidyne in their glass panel products. I have wondered for a while what they might do to combat the powerhouse that is Garmin. Garmin has quickly made in-roads with their G1000, even displacing Avidyne in what I consider Avidyne's flagship deployment platform - the Cirrus SR22. Currently, if you want to give Cirrus as much money as possible for an SR22 you will get a Garmin, not an Avidyne. Additionally, even when you do buy an Avidyne-equipped airplane Garmin STILL makes money - the Avidyne is always installed with Garmin radios and GPS units. I think Avidyne aims to fix that with their new FMS900w system . This new system replaces the Garmin radios in the installation with a keyboard equipped "remote pad" for entering waypoints, freqs, etc. It even has a QWERTY keyboard - imagine that! The system also includes updated main displays. These now support synthetic vision (much like you'd see in a f...