Comments on: Readers Poll – Glass-cockpit ?

By: Axel

Axel — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 16:25:09 +0000

“Do you look forward to get trained ? Can’t wait for it ?” — Yeah, that would indeed apply to me, since I am on the verge of starting my transition to the G1000. I really can’t wait!

By: Jason Miller

Jason Miller — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 22:08:20 +0000

I’ve been a huge fan of glass panels ever since I saw an ad for the Cirrus in 2002. Since then I’ve been very lucky to fly about 60 hours behind glass (mostly in a Cirrus) and plan to get checked out in my flight school’s new C172 G1000 very soon. I’ve just finished the King School’s transition course for the G1000 and look forward to putting it through its paces on some approaches with an instructor backing me up.

After having flown computer flight sims for 20 years or so, glass panel seems very natural to me. Can’t get enough of it!

By: jb

jb — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:15:28 +0000

Hi Plastic,

Interesting question. I fly most of the time on my club C172’s (R & SP variants) plus C182, all equipped with the Garmin G1000 (even with the Stormscope on the 182…).

I just love it, it gives you an unprecendented level of situation awareness. I found quite easy and natural the conversion training from the round gauges.

Nevertheless,I also regularly practice panel failures, flying with reference only to the back up gauges (if you like, you can easily do that by using the dim control of the G1000 to set to zero the brightness of the screens) which I also found easy to do, feeling also quite natural to revert back to the round dials for the attitude, airspeed and altitude…

Cheers,
jb

By: Julien

Julien — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 04:01:22 +0000

I’m happy I did all my PPL training on steam-gauge aircrafts. I know glass cockpits will eventually become the norm, and some of the newer aircraft models do not offer traditional panels as an option, it’s a glass cockpit or nothing. My intention is to eventually convert to glass, maybe at the same time I do my night VFR or instrument rating.

The club I fly with at the moment is thinking of buying two Cessna 162 Skycatcher, this could be a nice and cheap airplane to convert to glass cockpit in. I could also use a 172SP with G1000 maybe.

Ah yes, and I passed the PPL flight test two days ago. All went well, there should be a write-up of the whole flight on my blog in a week or so.