Garmin 396...and other ramblings about a G1000 T182
I bought a 396 last year at OSH because they dropped the price drastically with the intro of the 496, so maybe they will drop the price of the 496 when the 596 comes out. Makes sense to me...
Now for the real reason I posted this note...
A friend let me fly right seat in his new 2007 Turbo 182 Saturday. It has the G1000 twin displays with the Garmin autopilot and a whole bunch of other bells and whistles. Just for fun he demonstrated in VMC a GPS WAAS approach into DCU with the autopilot in control. WOW! It was amazing. All he had to do was adjust power to control his airspeed, but it did all the rest, even flying the "glideslope" down to decision height of 250 ft AGL. If we needed to do a missed approach, just a punch or two of some buttons and back up we go.
I was intimidated by all the information on the two screens as well as by all the buttons. I was also fascinated by the several ways the autopilot tells you ahead of time what it's going to do! Pretty spiffy! It's no wonder Cessna requires a few days of "schooling" on the G1000 for new buyers at their Kansas facility.
On the negative side, it took about 10 minutes after engine start to go through all the checklists before we could begin our takeoff roll. It didn't take quite as long on our second startup. Even though we had a short hop over to Moontown for lunch and back, I could see how this T182 would be a fine cross-country machine. It has oxygen and he flight plans for 155 knots.
What dawned on me Saturday is that there are a lot of us who are choosing avionics for our RV's who will never use all the functionality we are buying. Did you see the description of the avionics in Van's personal RV-10? It was in the RVator I received last week. IIRC, he installed an AFS-3500 with AOA, a 396, a Garmin Transponder, an ICOM radio, a Digiflite II autopilot, a PS Engineering intercom and that's it! Empty weight is just 1590 lbs. which for an RV-10 sounds pretty light. I'm getting ready to get back on the empennage and also order my wings, so who knows what avionics will be available by the time I'm ready, but I am looking forward to being at that point.
Don