By John D. Ruley

From the mid-1960s to the 1990s, instrument panels were dominated by round gauged analog flight instruments in a standard “six pack,” backed up by radios and navigation equipment in a central avionics stack. For close to 30 years, it was possible for a pilot to sit in the left seat of just about any instrument-capable airplane and find a familiar arrangement. You might have needed to consult the POH to figure out how to start it, but from that point on, with minor adjustments from one airplane to the next, you could fly it. Today, however, virtually all new-build airplanes equipped for instrument flying have a “glass panel,” in which the analog flight instruments are replaced by a digital presentation on a computer display. What’s it like to fly these systems? How hard is it to adapt to them—and how do they compare? Over the last year, I’ve flown all the main systems available on new-build piston singles, and here I’ll try to tell you what I’ve learned in the process.

Garmin was also the first vendor to offer synthetic vision technology (SVT) as an option in a glass panel for piston singles. I’ve flown SVT on both a Diamond DA-40 and a Cirrus SR-22G3. With SVT, the typical blue over brown AI background on the PFD is replaced by blue over computer-generated terrain. The terrain coloring looks like a sectional chart by default, but TAWS coloring is used if the predicted flight path risks a collision. Besides terrain, the system shows airports, runways, obstacles, and traffic. While the ground proximity system is cool (and potentially a lifesaver, if you fly around mountains or high towers), in my opinion traffic is the single most valuable feature. All glass panel systems can display traffic on the MFD, but that’s not where your eyes are most of the time. The greatest risk of collision comes from traffic ahead, and both times I’ve flown G-1000/SVT equipped airplanes, the system alerted me to traffic ahead well before I picked it up visually.

In my opinion, SmartDeck offers the best balance of features and the most natural user interface available in a glass panel for piston singles, though I really wish it had a full keyboard for waypoint entry. Unfortunately, while it has been STC’d in the SR22 G2 and is flying in the Cirrus Vision SJ50 jet prototype, it isn’t yet for sale.

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