Getting K airborne again

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 came back either.

After simply waiting a few minutes to see if it just needed time to fix itself, I then tried swapping into and out of rev mode a few times to see if that would help. It would always go into rev mode just fine but kept showing the same problem when coming out.

So I pulled out the pilot's guide for the G1000. That book had ZERO troubleshooting info, so it was no good to me.

After examining the circuit breaker panel diagram for a bit, I decided I could disable the autopilot and cycle the power on the #2 avionics bus to reboot the MFD. Doing that fixed the problem. At least rev mode kept working properly. :)

K's post about the flight is here.

Comments

zbtjkarapilot said…
I can certainly empathize with K's position. After long periods away from flying, one tends to get rusty. But, after a quick review you tend to settle down. Keep flying.
January 31, 2009 at 10:13 AM
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