Vectors To Final

Recently I went out to the airport bright and early to enjoy the brisk morning air and great climb rates. I made a 25 min trip up to KVUJ and back to get a little practice working with a towered airport. This trip taught me that I like the active traffic monitoring of the SkyWatch system (such as in the Cirrus) better than the ground-communication based traffic system (TIS) in the C172 G1000. I got what turned out to be a false traffic alert telling me that someone was right on top of me at my same altitude. I scrambled my head around trying to find it for a few very tense seconds before I heard the traffic alert stop. Looking back at the screen it appeared to be telling me that the traffic data I had just freaked out about was old data. Not good. Here's a bit of video from the flight:

I recently had the pleasure of taking a demo flight in a new friend's JetPROP airplane. A JetPROP is a Malibu/Mirage converted to use a Pratt & Whitney PT6A turbine engine and a Hartzell 4-blade reversible propeller. It is apparently the better way to go for a turboprop Piper vs. buying the Meridian (the JetPROP has more horsepower, better climb performance, lower fuel flows, and near-equal cruise speeds). I took some video of the flight which I have embedded below. Unfortunately youTube blurred the videos a good bit, but it will have to do for now. :) BTW, if you'd like to see a professional video of a very similar aircraft, the Piper Meridian, check out FlightVideoProductions (they have a few other cool videos for sale as well - think I will get the Col 400 one). Part 1: Part 2:

Tonight was my first solo with the G1000 avionics. It was also the perfect time to get night current again with the sun setting so early and the weather so nice (though a bit chilly). I went out to the airplane after dark, so preflight involved using a flashlight. Of note, my main flashlight's (a Surefire) batteries, which I had checked at home before leaving for the airport, went dead the instant I tried to use them at the airport. Thankfully I had a backup flashlight and another set of batteries. I wrestled with the brightness setting on the G1000 a bit - the auto mode was simply way too dark. It would have been fine up at altitude away from the airport lights, but down on the ground the screen was nearly unreadable until I manually set a higher brightness. I have the opposite problem with the Garmin 430 radio/gps units in the Cirrus - the auto-brightness on those seems to do absolutely nothing leaving the screen way too bright at night. For this flight I made 2 trips around...

For the final flight in my G1000 transition course we focused on failure scenarios. Not the "engine goes POOF" kind but the avionics kind. Normal situation This picture shows what the 2 Garmin screens show in a normal (non failure) situation. You can see we have 2 screens - the left PFD focusing on flight performance (airspeed, heading, attitude, altitude) and the right screen (MFD) focusing on engine data, mapping, checklists, and everything else. Failed PFD screen In this scenario the screen that is right in front of you (the PFD) has failed. This basically means the screen has gone dark. We simulate that by dimming the screen down to 0% brightness. After darkening the PFD we shot a GPS approach into Rock Hill. When this failure has occured you shift the G1000 into Reversionary mode. That means the info that is normally split across 2 screens is now merged into 1. It actually duplicates the same data on both screens, but since the PFD screen is no longer functioning...

Yesterday was my second flight behind the G1000. For this flight I kept the foggles on most of the time while shooting 3 instrument approaches - one LPV GPS, one VOR A, and one ILS . The LPV was almost magical. The G1000 coupled with the GFC 700 autopilot took over the vast majority of tasks for the entire approach. I had to push a few buttons now and then, and make power changes and radio calls, but beyond that I was just watching the instruments to make sure things were going as planned - which they did. I was incredible to see the plane going down the GPS-derived glideslope like it was on rails. WAAS is a huge advance for us folks that fly into smaller airports. The VOR -A approach was almost as easy. The extra steps there involve a little more autopilot management and manually switching to VOR mode when getting established on the approach. For the ILS I flew it using the flight director. I felt like I was chasing it a bit back and forth, but my instructor felt a sign...

My recent flight in the flight school's new C172 with the G1000 was my first flight in a new Cessna. I came away impressed with how smoothly the engine ran and how much improved the panel switches are on the new machines. The engine was fairly quiet for a C172 and purred like a kitten. There was no shaking panel, as many C172s I have flown have, and even the rudder pedals gave little vibration. Even at idle it ran very happily - no sputtering or protesting at all. The toggle switches in the new birds also feel much more substantial than in the older machines. They seem to be copies of what I imagine the Citations might have - not that I would know. It all comes together to give a feeling of quality that was surprising to me.

Yesterday I had my first instructional flight behind a G1000. The flight school recently bought a brand new C172 Nav III (not a leaseback as I had "feared"). My instructor Bill started off showing me the different preflight items in the cabin before I started the external walk around. While I was doing that he wiped down the displays as people have apparently been putting their hands all over the screens for some reason (people tend to like to touch glass panel screens I've noticed, but this was extreme). I guess that is why there is a market for $70 screen protectors . We cranked up the airplane, which was only mildly different from an older C172 with fuel injection. In the older planes, when I am priming the engine, I will turn on the fuel pump, put the mixture full rich, and then watch the fuel flow needle. Once it moves I turn off the fuel pump, pull the mixture out, and crank the engine. Once the engine fires I push the mixture full rich to keep it running. I...