2012 Cirrus G3 Perspective

Today I had a treat - a flight in a new Cirrus SR22. This was my first time flying with quite a few new features.

The Perspective system
This is Cirrus' take on the Garmin G1000 glass panel system. It includes a keyboard to reduce the amount of knob turning required when making, larger screens than the older Avidyne panels, and the excellent Garmin digital autopilot. In general, I was very impressed with the system. It provide a tremendous amount of automation and information gathering ability - way more then my older Avidyne. You do need to know how to navigate around using "the Garmin way" which is not always clear, but once you know how to use it it seems extremely powerful.

The G3 airframe
I hadn't flown the newer airframe until today. Introduced in 2007 it included quite a few changes. More fuel capacity, more vents for the pilot/co-pilot, a higher stance, the removal of the aileron/rudder interconnect (and increased wing tip/dihedral) and new exterior lights. In fact, my airplane was one of the last few G2s made. I did feeling that taxiing was easier without the interconnect, and the rudder pedals were super-smooth (but that's almost certainly due to the airplane's young age). It flew basically the same as what I'm used to in the G2. As an aside, this airplane has a particularly cool paint scheme, complete with a flat-black spinner on the front.

FIKI system
FIKI stands for flight into known icing. While my airplane has a "weeping wing" system that puts anti-ice fluid on the surfaces to clear frozen stuff away, this airplane has a much beefier version of the system, one that the FAA has said is legal to fly into icing conditions. In my opinion, it's too risky to intentionally take a small single engine airplane into known icing (icing is very dangerous) but having the extra piece of mind that the system offers would be valuable. The more basic weeping wing system is probably all I'd want though.

IR Camera
We only used this for a few minutes, but the airplane has a infrared camera mounted under the wing that you can view on the large middle display of the Perspective system. It won't really look through clouds, so its main purpose is for night operations. If you fly at night a lot I think it would be incredibly valuable. I don't, and actually I need to go out and get night current again sometime soon. :)

Bose A20 headset
I have been flying with the older Bose headsets, as well as the two generations of Zulu headsets. I didn't really notice a difference with the A20s during the flight, but the new airplane was quieter than I'm used to anyway, being in really good balance with low-time engine. For me the Zulu 2 is still my go-to headset.

ESP system
This system is engaged when the autopilot is off. It detects "extreme" attitudes, say rolling 60 degrees to the side or pitching the nose high, and auto-corrects them. We tested it by trimming the airplane to roll left on its own and letting go of the stick. Once the airplane rolled much past the 45 degree bank angle the system kicked in a rolled us close to level. It kept doing it when the airplane rolled back into the bank again. I believe it issued audio alerts too. That system seems like a great backup to help safety. It can be disabled in flight, but when it's running it's like having your instructor there watching for you to do something stupid.

Synthetic Vision
Synthetic vision provides a computer generated view of the terrain and water features in your flight path. This is shown on the main screen behind the standard instrumentation. If you get close to a mountain, or tower, or other airplane they are highlighted on the view to help you avoid them. Really impressive and Garmin's implementation was smooth and pretty to look at. Would be extra handy when flying through the clouds or on a dark night. With that comes a very handy new instrument - the flight path marker. It is a small circle that shows where the airplane is heading in the vertical and horizontal dimensions. Want to fly right to the approach side of the runway? Put the flight path marker on it. :)
Summary
All in all, the airplane offers a lot of handy features above what I am currently flying, and that is saying a lot - my current setup gives a tremendous amount of info and automation. I came away pretty impressed with how far the avionics tech has come in the last 5 years - truly amazing.

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