 Our next presenters are with Platinum Aviation, and they operate a Cirrus Standardized Training Center in the Opelaka Airport in the Miami area. They were among the first flight training centers to offer technically advanced aircraft instruction. Tina is the 19th, a correction, the 2007 Southern Region CFI of the year, and Kerry is a master CFI with NAFI. Their topic today is flying the glass cockpit. Let's welcome Tina Obrey and Kerry Hackney. Hey everybody, thanks for coming. Let's get right to it. Thanks for coming out this morning early. Like you said, we have a standardized training center, Cirrus, down at Opelaka. We have Cessna aircraft as well, and we've flown all kinds of glass cockpit airplanes since it all began back around 2004 and 2005. Like I said, Tina is the flight instructor of the year, and we're both FAA fast team members, and we give these presentations for the South Florida FISDA quite often. So like I said, we're going to talk about flying the glass cockpit. What are we going to do? We're going to talk about the advantages of the glass, which if you're here at Sun & Fun, you probably know most of them. What are the disadvantages? And how does it affect safety and training? Let's start out with the advantages. It has better overall situational awareness. Some of the things that I'll add to the situational awareness is you've got in some of these aircraft four moving maps at any given time right in front of you. It's unbelievable the situational awareness that you can have in the aircraft. And avoiding Charlie and Bravo airspace is so easy. If you're smart enough to select the right screen, instead of having it over on the checklist page, when you're nearing the Bravo airspace, keeping up with weather and avoiding bad weather is much easier with these planes because you can make decisions far in advance if you could with like weather radar or what not. Which comes to the next point about advanced weather information. It does not only have the weather radar on there and the next rad weather, but for the IFR pilots and people going on cross countries, you have the Winsiloft forecast, you've got temperatures, freezing levels. They also show air mitts, sigmets, convective sigmets, and you can zoom out the maps to see the weather, the next rad weather, and the air mitts and sigmets all over the country on the main moving map screen. Tina and I both fly our planes that have the new, you know, the satellite downlink weather and weather radar, and we finally don't really use the radar anymore at all. You've got to poke your nose in it to see what's going on. And this we can make decisions 150 miles out. Traffic awareness. Now, all of the advantages are also going to be brought up as disadvantages, this being one of the biggest ones. The enhanced traffic awareness, it will show you other aircraft traffic targets that have their transponders on. So you get a better idea of what's going on in crowded airspace, and you can actually in some of the aircraft zoom in the map to like a two mile ring where you can see traffic and you can zoom it out to a 12 mile ring on a lot of them to see traffic. Some of them have the TIS system, and of course it goes away when you get away from the terminal area. Others have the active traffic system where you have traffic all the time no matter where you go. We go to the Bahamas a lot, so we're glad we have that because depends on the weather out there, there's a lot of low-lying, low-flying, scud-running people trying to get into some of those islands out there, and the active system is much better. Terrain awareness in most of these airplanes to avoid sea-fit accidents. Exactly. It doesn't really affect us so much in Florida, but if you're flying outside of Florida it becomes very helpful to have the terrain awareness, and it has an actual page on a couple of the maps that are dedicated to the terrain, and it will actually talk to you if you're getting too close to terrain or if you have a sink rate coming up. It will tell you that you're getting too close to terrain. Not only will you be able to see it on the map and the height of the tallest terrain, but it will also shout at you if it doesn't like what you're doing. One of the things we do in the serious standardized training is we demonstrate talls maneuvers, what to do when this goes off, and the one thing that I will warn you about though, like over Florida, over a very flat area, if you're in a slow descent, say you had the autopilot set wrong and you're in a slow descent towards the ground, this thing's probably not going to talk to you in time, and you may hit an antenna or a telephone pole or something like that. It works very well with rising terrain because you have a 30 second notice, but with a slow descent to flat terrain, it's a little sketchy. I keep always when I do the demonstration, I say it should go off anytime, it should go off, and sometimes it doesn't go off. Integrated flight management systems, all this stuff is all hooked together, and that gets to be something we'll talk about in a minute more. One of the advantages of having everything hooked together is once you're comfortable with operating the system, your autopilot, your maps, your GPS, everything acts as one system once you get comfortable using it. It makes for an easier transition to other aircraft. How many of you have flown glass cockpit airplanes? Have you flown more than one? That's the thing that I find the most interesting. I mean, we fly virtually all of them, and if you have a Cessna 182 with a Garmin G1000 package in it, you've been flying it around for a hundred hours, and then you get into the Cessna Mustang Jet, which has basically the same thing other than the big MFD in the middle, and the data entry pad, which just makes it easier. It's not more complicated, it's easier. You sit in these airplanes and you feel at home, and a lot of times with transitions, the hardest thing is trying to figure out where to look to see the information. Yeah, if you're proficient or comfortable in one type of glass cockpit aircraft, it is very easy and takes little time to transfer to another type of glass cockpit or another manufacturer. And it's no longer the future, as you all know, it is the now, it is the present. All aircraft manufacturers, even light sport and experimental, are coming out with all glass cockpits. The only plane I fly now that doesn't have glass is a King Air 200. And here's a King Air 90, and I'd feel actually more comfortable in that one because I know where to look for things. We fly the Cirruses a lot, since we're the training center in that area. But we also have a lot of customers that have Piper, Saratoga's, Malibu's, and Meridian's. And we fly in those, and it's very simple to make that transition because all the buttons are the same. You may find slight software differences between like engine pages and like pipers don't have the checklist in them like the Cirruses do. But other than that, everything's pretty much the same. Do you want to say anything about that one? You fly that one the most. I even do some turboprop transitioning, and we've even got the glass cockpit now in aircraft like the Meridian, and the other turboprops have that. And it's just very easy for someone stepping out of a Cirrus into a turboprop to transition from one glass panel to the next glass panel. It makes it very simple. So everything that has an advantage comes with a price, and so there are disadvantages to some of this stuff. And we've been doing it long enough that we see trends, stuff that everybody does, the vast majority of people do. We've even can bring it down to the common things that private pilot, initial training people do, instrument people do. And some of the ones we see that are the hardest to transition are guys that have like fifteen, eighteen hundred hours been flying around. They've developed a lot of habits and the, you know, primacy of learning. They've learned their way and trying to transition to this is sometimes harder. We teach people primary training in the Cirruses, and we find that very easy. Because the guy doesn't know anything. We put him out there, and it is what it is, and they learn it. The biggest one is too much time with the eyes and the cockpit. And we could go on for days on this one, really. With all the GWIS stuff in there, all the four moving maps that I talked about as an advantage, all the traffic now that you have available in there. We find everyone wants to get focused on something, some point in the glass cockpit, whether it's the traffic, a moving map, trying to set up a GPS that they're not all that familiar with, getting stuck on an item perhaps, leaving the checklist up. It's, this is one of the biggest problems is people don't stop to look outside. I have to remind myself when I'm teaching in these to look outside. I have to literally keep check on myself to look outside. The, I find it has different levels with the different people. Like with, how many, do we have any CFIs in the audience? Do you teach in glass panel planes much? If you haven't taught in glass panel planes and you start to do some precautions you need to think about. You know, with a, when I first started doing it with private pilots, you sit there and you think, well do I, just teach them how to fly first and then teach them this glass stuff? Or do we kind of take it all at once? And we're finding that if you start them right from scratch with the glass and every time from day one we're going somewhere, enter a flight plan that takes us to the training area but, and beyond. So they start learning how to press the buttons and what to look for. Now indeed when you're trying to teach them how to land, and if any of you that are not instructors, listen to it from the student side. The, when you're teaching them how to land sometimes, yeah we do have to turn it off. And sometimes even cover up the airspeed indicator and get them to look at the outside and learn how to feel the plane and how to really fly it instead of trying to fly it using nothing but this information. With, with instrument students, of course they're supposed to be inside the cockpit but a lot of times they're looking at the wrong thing. With instrument people, there's always been a problem with people fixating on the wrong instrument. And you know you're telling their altitudes off and the next thing you know the heading goes away. With this, they'll, they'll have it on a checklist page. They're looking over at the checklist page and they just forget to fly the airplane. Two little experience with the equipment. Two little experience with the equipment. I'm not being familiar with the capabilities of the equipment in the aircraft. Not knowing what page you should have the MFD, the big multifunction display or your big moving map. Not knowing which page during what phase of flight to have that on is, is one of the things that we see. And not knowing what all the automation, what it's capable of doing. Talk about the check-outs and how you can get a check-out with. Getting, we've had people come in 5,000 hour plus CFIs or commercial pilots, you know, corporate pilots coming and expecting to get a regular aircraft check-out on one of the glass cockpit airplanes. And they're a little offended when we tell them it's going to take a little more than the 1.3 or 1.5 hour check-out that might be in the little Piper Warrior. And they get offended by that. But it takes a little more time and a little more familiarity with the aircraft in order to get checked out, in order to be experienced in it. Needing to know what the electrical system diagram, what that schematic is. If you're not familiar with that ever in a POH, that's going to become one of your best friends in an electrical airplane. So, one of the things that, you know, some people see is bad and some people see is good, I think is good. Cirrus has really got on board with the insurance companies and standardized the program that you have to learn to be transitioned into these airplanes. Some of the manufacturers haven't, and depending on what kind of airplane you, if you're a renter, you know, you go to a rental place and you can get assessed on 172 with glass and some kid that has flown it maybe 20 hours and he checks you out in it. You're an instrument rated pilot and you're checked out and off you go, kind of the blind lead in the blind. If you go to fly one of these things, make sure you're learning from somebody that knows the equipment well. If you get checked out to fly at IFR, learn how to fly at VFR before you go getting in the system. Especially if you have failures of the equipment, you really need to know this stuff inside out and backwards to fly at IFR in the system in bad weather. Overdependence on automation. This is a big one because most of these planes have autopilots and an awful lot of people that are transitioning into them have not flown with autopilots. They've not flown with autopilots, not knowing what the autopilot is capable of, what it's not capable of. With all these aircraft, the autopilot has its own little avionics book and you'll have to go through and read that, find out what the limitations are for that autopilot, how many degrees of flaps you're allowed to use the autopilot with, what's your minimum airspeed you're allowed to use the autopilot with, minimum altitude for autopilot. We find a lot of people get over dependent on the autopilot and think as soon as they lift off the ground they can just turn it on and that's it. It's designed to be flown automated and they're just going to fly it on the autopilot. They may go hundreds of hours of flying it, taking it off, autopilot on, autopilot off and landing. It works for hundreds of hours but then one day it doesn't. It's a bad day. You've got to really not be too over dependent on this. We can tell you a lot of stories. In training it's really interesting to watch people what they do. From day one when I'm teaching a private pilot, I tell them never to do anything in an airplane without verifying that what you think you told it to do, it actually did. Simple as putting flaps down. Just because you put the lever down don't mean they went down. Verify that they went down. Either the gauge or the look outside and see or both. With autopilot, with transition people, we see them do all kinds of crazy things. They'll press it. We're supposed to be westbound. All of a sudden we're in a turn. Here we go. We make it all the way back around to east when they finally ask me, why is it doing that? I'm like, he told it to. They just kind of want to have blind faith in this new machine they're messing with. It'll take them where they want to go and it's not the case. We had one case of a guy that he got his instrument rating when we were at Christmas up there. He got his instrument rating in it. We taught him how to fly in a serious private pilot. This guy was sharper than most. Went out and bought himself an SR-22. And let's say sharper than most. She did his instrument rating. He was really good. And come Christmas time I was up in Duluth picking up another airplane and the weather was really bad. And he was somewhere in Georgia. I didn't even know he was there. And he called Tina and wanted to know what to do about the weather because it was bad. She says, we'll call Kerry. He's in Atlanta. See what he's going to do. Turns out I was leaving the same day. So I told him what I thought of the various situations he could do, how he could handle it. And told him I'd come up on a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and when I got up in the air I'd call and see. I didn't know what time I was leaving. As it turned out we were only 40 miles apart. He was ahead of me. And I was above the overcast in the clear. There was some reported light icing down in there. And he was down below. And so I told him what to do, told him how to get a frequency and climb up through it because it was very thin and climb up really fast and get through it. And I gave him plenty of time to do it. And then I was like, hey, where are you? You got to be up on top by now. He goes, yeah, I'm breathing now. He had an autopilot failure first week after getting his IFR rating as he climbed through that cloud layer. He engaged the autopilot and it commanded a hard right bank and gave him the airplane back in full right trim. So, you know, it could happen to you at the worst time. Well, it usually does. That's usually the only time it happens. And any time you're using automation and you feel that the airplane might be doing something that you did not command or might be doing something that you don't like, you've got to really be sharp enough to just turn the autopilot off and then sort out the problem and see what caused that. Some of that goes back to too much eyes in the cockpit. They kind of go together. I had another guy, took off from FXC. This is one of those 2,000 hour guys. Took off from Fort Lauderdale Executive, engaged the autopilot right when he was supposed to. Then he's got his head down in the cockpit looking and pressing buttons. If I hadn't been there, he would have crashed at Pompano Airport in a left-hand descending bank with the autopilot on and everybody would have been going, what happened there? He set up the autopilot room. And with any autopilot before you get in an aircraft that has autopilot, you need to always be sure that you know all of the ways to disengage the autopilot, even know where the circuit breaker is for the autopilot, or put a marker on the circuit breaker for the autopilot so that you've got all the ways to disengage it in the event that you have a runaway autopilot or you can't get it to turn off. And these planes know how the autopilot functions or does not function. You have PFD, primary flight display failure. A lot of these planes have turn coordinators that you cannot see that are the rate-based information that is driving the autopilot and that turn coordinator is a hidden instrument. That's what happened in Hank's case, that instrument had failed but the link that tells the autopilot that it had failed did not work. So the instrument was spun up, the gyros were working, but it was showing, when we took it out, it was showing a hard left turn so the autopilot was commanding the hard right turn. All these planes have an increased chance of input error. Just look at all the buttons on these systems. I mean, lots of buttons, lots of chances for you to press the wrong one. And don't get too tied up or too focused on an input error. If you don't like something's not right or you don't like what you entered in, you still have to fly the aircraft and then go back and try to fix the error that you put in. The bottom line is it's still an airplane, still flies like any other airplane. And if you're trying to enter something into one of the maps or one of the GPS's and you get tangled up or twisted up, you just press and hold the clear button and fly the plane and give yourself a chance to get back to that and re-enter the correct information. Like in my earlier discussion of the guy that let it fly all the way east when we're supposed to be flying west, if you engage the autopilot and it starts to turn at all that you're not expecting disconnected and if you're supposed to be flying generally that way, go generally that way and climb if that's what you're supposed to be doing. Still an airplane, don't get caught up in all the automation. Increased chance of cockpit distractions. There's an awful lot to look at and an awful lot that you can have the screen incorrectly set on. Yeah, there's an awful lot going on in there in all of the glass cockpit aircraft, which is what makes it so good, but it also is a huge distraction for everybody. For the pilot, for the instructor, there's just a lot to look at with the two big TV screens in there. Like I was saying, transition people and people with high time and we've kind of developed, we know how this is going to work out with most people. A zero time person has no problem with this stuff. One of the most difficult ones is a person that just got their private pilot license in a conventional plane. You put them in one of these and they got way too much to look at. Would you agree with that? I agree. Which leads to information overload. I mean, I had one just last week that was a very same, what I just said, the person that just got their private pilot license took them out in one of these planes. They had no clue what to look at. Got so nervous I had to fly the plane back because there was just too much information for them. Anything to add on that? No. Then lack of currency, we're going to get back to this in a little bit. Yeah, this is a big one. Not lack of currency as the FAA would require it, but lack of currency with being in the class cockpit aircraft and flying these technically advanced airplanes a little more often than you normally would. If you normally just go out and get in a 172 or a steam gauge airplane and fly out on a Saturday and fly around with your friends or go over the beach and do that once a month, that's fine. If you take that type of flying and put it into a class cockpit aircraft, you're really going to be going through all of the things that we've discussed on the disadvantages. It takes more work to stay current in these aircraft because of all the buttons and all the knobs and all the GWIS technology that's in there. Remember, this is going back a little bit. Remember the old joke about everybody's VCR was flashing 12 noon because nobody knew how to set it? My home theater system hooked into my stereo and TV at the house. If I accidentally set on the remote control and the TV goes away, sometimes it takes me 15, 20 minutes to figure out how to get the TV back on. It's the same thing with these, but my TV's not going 200 miles an hour. So you need to be intimately familiar with this stuff. And the only way to do it is to stay current. I mean, on 172 with conventional gauges, if you take the FAs, absolute minimum currency requirements and go do it, is that safe? Maybe. Could you do it? Yeah. Try to do that in these, especially instrument currency. There's absolutely no way you're going to maintain minimum instrument currency and be safe in a plane like this. So we know what the advantages are and we know what the disadvantages are. There's got to be a way around it, so how can we mitigate the disadvantages? Because quite frankly, I think these planes are the simplest planes I've ever flown. But I know how to do it. And there's no reason that other people can't learn how to do it. Better training is the key. Better initial training. So let's talk about that for a minute. Do you go on that? Let me go ahead. It was kind of going back to like a checkout you could get. If you go to a place that has a glass cockpit plane, I mean, because anybody can buy a glass cockpit plane and throw it out on their rental line. And depending on their insurance requirements, you know, as a serious standardized training center, we're bound by contract with serious to do it a certain way. And we won't sign you off until you are good to go. And for the most part, with those particular planes, insurance companies are on board with it. But with a lot of, I mean, all the planes are going glass now. So you show up at a place and you get checked out in this airplane. If you didn't have really good initial training in the thing, and you don't know, because maybe you were taught by a guy that didn't know, it gets a little sketchy about how safe you are. Ongoing recurrent training. Well, we're required through our contract with serious that everyone has to do recurrent training. Our instructors have to do it every six months on the glass cockpit. And all of our clients or rental customers have to do it at least once a year. And it's an actual syllabus for the recurrent training. It takes a minimum of a half a day. A lot of people will do two or three days to do recurrent training. And it's focused a lot on failures. Failures with the maps, the electrical systems. Some of these planes have multiple alternators, multiple batteries. You know, two buses, two electric buses. Not everything's just took together on one bus anymore. So the ongoing recurrent training is very important. We have some clients that have their own cirruses or have their own planes or even just rent ours. And they do recurrent training almost once a week. They'll schedule a lesson and go fly with one of us once a week, just so that when they want to go out on their own, a couple weeks from now and fly, they're very comfortable. Everything is second nature to them in the aircraft. And they stay current that way. Most of the people that we teach, we're kind of a unique flight training center. We're not teaching young people to be pilots, to go on to be airline pilots and just cramming them through the system. 100% of our business is mostly business guys that are kind of getting tired of the airlines. And with some of these newer, faster airplanes, they can be reliable transportation for them. But they have to stay 100% current and proficient in flying the airplane. More serious attitude about flying by pilots that one subject could make us talk for days. For days. We see people come in and want to transition into the glass cockpit aircraft that as we're talking about encompasses a lot more to do. A lot more things to do, it takes a lot more of your attention to fly the planes of the glass cockpit aircraft. So pilots that have come in that really don't believe that the far aim applies to them. It only applies to the commercial airliners or the corporate pilots or that radio phraseology doesn't really apply to them or cloud clearance minimums don't apply. That kind of attitude doesn't transfer well into the glass cockpit aircraft because we've got so much going on that you really have to take a professional attitude towards flying one of these aircraft. A professional approach to flying. And then we do a lot of these seminars for our South Florida FISDO. And sometimes we have whole seminars about that topic. The bad thing about having a seminar about that topic is the people that are here, they're not who would need to reach. You guys have a positive attitude about this or you wouldn't be going to safety seminars. We need to somehow reach out to the people that don't make that effort to stay proficient in what they're doing and take it very seriously. So you transition into one of these new airplanes. I took these slides from one of the presentations that we use in the serious transition training put together by University of North Dakota. It may be a little hard to see but the biggest thing, the one on the graph on the left shows that the accidents and it's showing total accidents and fatal accidents. The one on the left is people that are a hundred hours or less in a new aircraft of any type. And you can see how fast that drops off. I mean it's just amazing that your first hundred hours are by far your most dangerous. And I would think in these planes that really needs to be overemphasized. Same thing with the certificate level. If you have a private pilot license and you're flying a glass cockpit plane really think about getting the instrument ready. I mean a lot of these planes are traveling machines. With all the weather and things it makes it it almost can sucker you into going on trips that you wouldn't normally go on because you can see the weather so well on these screens and that brings up another topic we'll talk about in a little bit about the weather presentation and how you learn about that. But the higher certificate rating you have the safer you are and the more time and type. Checklist usage in these glass cockpit planes and some of them the checklist is on the glass panel on the MFD. If you're below that hundred hour mark I want to make sure you work through that thing every single time you go out. Too many things you can miss. We're talking about taking a more serious approach to your flying. In a plane that you're intending to use this really goes to all planes but in a plane you're intending to use for traveling purposes not just beating around the pattern a little bit but an awful lot of our people like I say use it for travel. Adopt business flying practices business and corporate departments have stated minimums that they do and they stick to that and they made those decisions while on the ground when they had a clear mind you get up in the air and maybe you'll press on when you normally wouldn't have pressed on if you've sat down and written it out and decided what your minimums are and what you're willing to do and what you're not willing to do it may help you one day. Do you have anything to add to that? This is just another one of those slides out of the serious stuff that we do it shows that most of the flying is done as personal flying and it's also the biggest contributor to accidents. Business flying and corporate flying have a far less percentage of accidents than personal flying does. So if you'll adopt those kinds of policies and I've had this feeling with my own flying since day one I thought that if I tried as hard as I could I might not be as good as those guys might not be as highly trained but if I really tried to fly like them I would be safer. That's why I'm my own flying. If I'm going somewhere I'm IFR all the time because I'm talking to controllers positive separation. So how do we accomplish this better training that we're talking about? We need more highly trained flight instructors when it comes to these glass cockpit airplanes. Yeah. If you're going somewhere to get checked out in a glass cockpit aircraft please sit down with the instructors and make sure that they understand how the aircraft works. Sit down and ask them get the electrical schematic out ask them where the items are located make sure your instructor knows these items where the secondary battery is what the alternator two is connected to and what happens if you lose alternator two. Sit down and talk to your instructors and make them show you all of these items because you really need to understand them if your instructor can't do that sit down with them and figure it out together or get a different instructor. Yeah, we've had it. We have a real hard time trying to find good instructors to teach for us in these planes and part of the problem is we'll ask them so you got any glass cockpit time? Oh yeah, 800 hours teaching in G1000 sessions. Okay. So then I'll start asking them a few questions about some of the systems. No clue. They're over and over so you got the blind leading the blind like I said earlier and sometimes that's not good so try to through reputation or asking around try to find instructors if you want to get checked out on this that really know the systems and equipment especially the failure modes, that's the key. It's really important that you feel comfortable with knowing the electrical systems and all the other systems in the aircraft and that you feel comfortable knowing how to handle things when they fail. That's very essential. See a lot of this stuff is Generation 1 on this glass panel stuff. What you see out there now the biggest ones, the Garmin G1000 and the Avidion systems that's the first thing to hit the market who knows where this stuff is going and everybody's just kind of had to adapt to it as they do and some manufacturers have kind of helped and worked towards it and the FAs kind of trying to work towards it I mean we go down to the FISDA we're supposed to go this month and get the instructors down there about the aircraft system so they know better about what to look for. These days you could early on in the glass panel flying you could go for an instrument rating with an examiner that hadn't flown a glass panel all that much himself. So really try to find knowledgeable people to help you transition to these airplanes. Scenario based training methods. Anybody know what fits is or the scenario based training methods? This is something that we've incorporated with our serious training fits is FAA industry training standards which is scenario based training methods where instead of the typical taking a private pilot student out and spending a lot of time on S-turns and turns about a point and so for the rectangular course and all that we actually make a flight somewhere on every lesson that we do. Every lesson has a mission has a flight, a mission that the pilot might do after he gets his or her certificate and during those flights we do, we incorporate failures, we incorporate all the what-ifs we do diverting we'll make up scenarios where pretending that the weather has gotten bad we can't get to our destination now what are you going to do so it incorporates decision making skills into every flight lesson. People that are learning in these glass cop hit planes from scratch it's kind of a little bit different method you know and in the older airplanes when you learn to fly they took you out, did the basic maneuvers, took you back and learned how to land and then they soloed you in very short time and at that point you had no clue how to get anywhere and then we started down the path of how do you get somewhere in these planes we kind of turn it around a little backwards we do the maneuvers we're supposed to do prior to solo and all the conventional things are supposed to do but typically these people solo later but by the time they do they already know they can take you anywhere you want to go they can avoid their space with no problem at all failures are no problem for these people even on their first solo and they solo later they seem to all finish in about the same amount of time that conventional gauge pilots finish our instrument pilots are all finishing in the minimum amount of time I think on that one it's because the situational awareness is so much higher I mean if you know where you are exactly it's much easier to get where you're going and these planes offer that I'm both an altitude information and horizontal situational awareness where you are and so it just makes for much easier transitions I think and on the transitions into the glass cockpit for those that are already pilots the scenario based training helps a lot because you're from day one doing flights to other airports every lesson are flights to multiple airports with diversions which are going to be the same type of flights you're going to be making on your own once you're checked out in the aircraft so it's very beneficial if you come to a place like ours to be transitioned into it know that most of the lessons are going to be about like what she's talking about initially we'll learn to fly the airplane just a little bit and of course the ground on systems functionality and all that but the vast majority of it will be cross country flying to various places with something going wrong and you having to decide what you want to do based on what's left working in that airplane I don't know if any of you when I first started flying glass planes I thought oh what if this stuff goes out I don't know if anybody had that thought I quickly got over that the backup systems in these planes are so numerous that's just not an issue really I mean I find them very safe as far as that kind of thing goes PFD failures are no problem at all people that don't have their instrument rating on a conventional gauge plane you're supposed to go and do the partial panel flying when you lose your primary attitude information and these planes are supposed to put the autopilot on so it kind of gets a little easier now for some of this training that we're talking about and to mitigate these disadvantages we need the cooperation of the pilots we see a lot of problems there like I had mentioned a little bit earlier the 5,000 hour pilot or CFI that wants to get checked out or wants to come teach in these aircraft get a little testy when we tell them that they need more than that hour and a half checkout or hour and a half sign off to fly the glass cockpit aircraft and we kind of run against some attitudes with instructors or pilots that feel it's not quite necessary for them to go through the actual syllabus or the whole training course because they're such a great pilot yep, happens a lot so the funny thing is we were told we go to Cirrus Symposium we're going to now is it next week or week after up in Duluth and they have this really good speaker this a human factors speaker he's a doctor I'm going to listen to him they handed us the agenda number one main speaker human factors it's going to be boring but the guy's the greatest speaker I've listened to in aviation and one of the things that he says that sticks with me forever is that the best pilots think they're the worst and the worst pilots think they're the best and we see that over and over and over and that's where this getting the pilots to cooperate on this recurrent training and transition programs is really important Tina mentioned FITS courses how many of you have heard of a FITS course? not many need to get the word out on what FITS is FITS is FAA and industry training standards the FAA when these technologically advanced aircraft came along and all realized that the training needed to change a little bit and so they got with the manufacturers and educators colleges and universities and the factories and they came up with these FITS approved by the wrong word FITS accepted courses so in our serious training manuals it has a syllabus and every lesson and it's been reviewed by the FAA and been found to be accepted by the FAA so all the various methods of how to say fly instrument approaches that have all been reviewed some of them are a bit different than using conventional gauges so how does all this new technology affect the training requirements? well clearly systems knowledge is very important I would say that is the most important thing with our private pilot people you take a guy in a conventional 172 and he's learning how to fly and you tell him you really need to know your systems this is going to be very important and as most examiners I've talked to most private pilot applicants have a very low understanding of aircraft systems they barely manage to get through the world with systems with these technological advanced airplanes they're forced to learn the systems there's no way around it nothing else to say about that? the systems on them are much more complicated more like the little light jets that are going to come out you might have multiple batteries multiple electrical buses the pedostatic system gets to be more complicated where that goes to how it controls autopilot air data computers traffic pfd's primary flight displays when they go out what happens how does the autopilot respond to that pfd failure? do you still have traffic in a lot of planes you don't because pfd tells you the heading and the heading is needed to tell you your relative position to the traffic same thing with terrain awareness so you lose one thing you might lose two more but then you have plenty more systems to save you and if you know how those things are all backed up they're quite safe but you need to know it you can't be thinking about it when you're in the weather going 200 miles an hour so in button and knobology you're key to this it's very easy to get tangled up in all the buttons and knobs that the glass cockpit offers and staying up staying up and staying current staying in the aircraft staying in the plane helps you with the button and knobology being able to maneuver your way through them yeah I mean like the Garmin G1000 I think I heard it has 108 buttons and knobs and a lot of that stuff is hidden I mean you got to know which page to go down through these layers to get to the information you want seems the avidine stuff is much more user friendly than that regard and I think those PFD's and MFD's take less time to learn everything's right in front of you one of the things I say to my students all the time if you'll just take the time to look and read the information you need is in front of you of course you got the Garmin 430's in those systems and those have some hidden levels and screens that you need to sort out and the avidine equipment you really need to learn how to use those GPS navigators before you start these airplanes and there's simulators available to do that ability to handle failures we've talked about that a lot and that story I told you with Hank coming back with me ahead of me from Atlanta when he had the auto pilot failure Tina clearly taught him something right because that was a bad one and a bad time yeah any failure is never going to happen at a good time so if you stay current in the plane and you're comfortable in it the systems and the nobology you'll be able to handle the failures and failures should be part of the training any training that you do in glass cockpits you should go ahead and actually fail the system turn it off pull the circuit breakers don't just pretend that something failed go ahead shut it down pull the breakers and actually make it fail and continue on to your destination or divert to another air whatever the best decision is divert to another airport continue on and fly with the failed equipment because it's never going to happen to you in real life at a good time it's always going to be at the worst time one of the things I tell my transition people when they first come into the office and they're talking about flying these planes I tell them in this transition course when I fail something I'm not going to do it at a time that it's going to be dangerous I'm not going to if the action calls for turning off the entire electrical system I'm not going to do it when we're in bravo airspace so I'm going to be already ahead of it on that stuff so in a lot of training that I've seen done before a lot of failures are done as pretends what would you do if the radio didn't work right now it's all just talking about it in the training we do on these kind of things it's all real and I tell people I say if the action calls for pulling the circuit breakers pull them if it calls for turning things off turn it off if it calls for immediate action of turning things off do it immediately and if it calls for an emergency descent at V&E do that too it's all very realistic and sometimes it's quite eye opening I mean you have a simulated electrical fire an electrical airplane I mean all these systems are electric and if you're VFR the action is to turn off all electrical items so you turn them off then you start simulating that the fire didn't go out well now we got to do an emergency descent so what is that shove the nose over to V&E or close to it and you're going down at 6000 feet a minute looking at nothing but grass and guess what you don't have any headsets anymore because you turned off the electrical system so you take that off and it's loud the wind noise is quite loud when you do that and then I always look over to the guy and say where are we going to go where are we going to land we're on fire well they turned off the MFD they don't know where they're at they didn't have their map out so it's kind of a very realistic training it makes them think ahead next time they'll have their map out ability to hand fly and manage systems that happens because the autopilots actually do fail a lot in real life I can attest to that once people become familiar and comfortable with flying it fully automated which was what it was designed to how it was designed to be flown then they get a little too dependent on the autopilot and start getting all happy because they can fly it fully automated and look they know how to push all the buttons and this is easy because it is the easiest airplane to fly once you understand and can manage all of the information that is there for you people stop hand flying once they get all the automated systems down and no longer stay current hand flying the aircraft and managing the electronics in the plane the moving maps and the GPS's so that's something that you have to continue to stay current on and practice on as well once you get the automation down the ability to properly manage this automation this because you have an automated system doesn't mean it's proper to use it at that particular moment the don't talk about it go ahead there's times when you should use different levels of automation and times when you should hand fly it's sometimes hard to get people to turn on the autopilot and then it's sometimes hard to get them to turn it off you'll see them enter in the traffic pattern turn in the heading bug it's like no fly it that's the time when you need to know how to fly the plane so different levels in airline flying they teach that different levels of automation when it's appropriate to use it ability to properly configure the avionics for the current flight conditions that's the big one it's very easy to get once again tangled up in that the proper configuration current flight conditions if we're climbing out under a shelf of bravo airspace and we've just departed our airport and we've still got the engine page up on our big multi-function display it might be a little bit more important to have like a moving map on as long as everything's in the green being aware of what your options are to have displayed at any given time is something that you have to be thinking about flying these aircraft it's not going to do you any good taking off and flying out to the training area with the checklist page up on the MFD you need to set it and configure it so that it's always at your best benefit the biggest benefit that you can have that's right have everything doing the best thing it can do the um we have all the frequencies and runway layouts is one of the pages you can have so as you're approaching the airport to get the aides go over to your trip page and you can pull up the airport boom there it is easy to find and you get all your information off there set your radios up figure out what runway you're going to land on on the other page ahead of time and see what the wind is there or at a nearer airport or something so you don't have to overfly even you can already know which way to enter the pattern before you ever get there and then people leave that screen up once you use the screen you got all that information off of there go back to the map screen where the traffic's being displayed and air spaces are being displayed all comes down to currency you hear that word all the time currency currency currency and there's printed material the FAA publishes about what makes you current and what doesn't and the manufacturers print information about what makes you current in some cases but all that still doesn't add up to proficiency and proficiency is what keeps you flying safe and this technology is all changing now what we're saying today very specific on specific pieces of equipment we just did a GPS seminar the other day for the south florida fizz dough and as I'm putting it together I had to realize that everything I'm saying is going to be different two weeks from now I mean it's just changing like this this is all it's computers now you know with with older aircraft used to you'd have to have a major airframe change or a major engine change everything was new and now it's computers it's one's and zero's somebody's sitting down in front of a keyboard and that avidine screen next week can do 10 times what it did last week and to be able to keep up with that you have to be real serious about it if you want to fly those kinds of airplanes you're going to see a revolution in airplanes like you saw in the computer industry over the last 10 or 20 years you know I mean my laptop computer is now this iPhone and it you know two years from now this will be a piece of garbage and it's going to be the same way with airplanes who knows what we're going to see in these things it's already that way with the airplanes with our glass panels we're getting software updates every month every few weeks we get a next software update where something has changed something new is added on there and it's kind of like great we've got more stuff to manage now but it's just constantly changing constantly so it takes quite a bit of work to stay proficient in it well I could take a simple G1000 172 2004 model go out there and buy a brand new one really resembles no similarity to it that new Garmin Auto pilots in it the software is all revised it's a totally new system it's wonderful but if you get the basics down in any glass panel aircraft it is very fun to fly it makes flying so much easier once you kind of get through the nobology and knowing what to do at what time and how to manage the systems it really makes flying a lot easier much more safe we believe because of the situational awareness and all the wealth of information that's right there in front of you if you use it properly and stay proficient it's very safe and very easy to fly and it is if you're proficient in it easy to transfer to any other glass cockpit aircraft or any of the updates that the current panels have and get well we just got a few minutes left does anybody have any questions for us we fly most of these things I'd really be interested to know how much you use simulators whether you teach people how to use WAS for instance as that's coming in the wide area augmentation and I had one other is doing a commercial rating in a glass cockpit different than if you were to do a commercial rating in a steam gauge aircraft well we don't use simulators much at all with the clients that we have they actually prefer to get in the aircraft itself and go out and do physically fly the plane themselves and many of our clients own their own aircraft too as far as WAS we are currently teaching WAS every day it's been an easy transition for people people new to the system because that's all they know when we introduce WAS they don't know any different we have to tell them that not everybody is as fortunate as they are and people that had the old system down with the GPS is going into WAS have just been very grateful for the WAS so we have been teaching that and what was the last part of the commercial we've not had any problem in fact we've had some come check with us that want to spend some time in our glass cockpits because they're going for airline interviews and they've never flown anything automated they don't know what an HSI they've never flown an HSI or with any glass so it's actually helpful for those people the WAS stuff really is a no brainer that is so simple the GPS navigator is telling you to turn in 8, 7, 6, 5 it counts it down autopilot it does automated holds and automated procedure turns you can sit back and just monitor the system as it enters your hold in a parallel like it told you it was going to and you just really babysit it you watch and make sure that it entered the hold on the parallel like it said it was going to it's quite amazing any other questions if you're going to get your instrument rating and your intention is to fly 80% or more in a G1000 or glass cockpit type airplane would you recommend getting your instrument rating in the G1000 and if so how hard is the transition back to a steam gauge airplane occasionally to fly regularly? If your goal is to fly in a glass cockpit plane most of the time I would definitely 100% say do your instrument rating in that plane transitioning back to the other way is not hard we were wondering about this ourselves the thing is is that and it goes back to her question about simulators flying a glass plane is almost like flying a simulator because you can see your error on the MFD as it goes so when you're learning about how to do certain instrument procedures like holds for example which are confusing to most people it's right there on the screen it's very clear and you can see how your actions affected what's on the screen I don't think it's a hard transition back I do think that getting the instrument rating in the glass panel is very easy partial panel is you have more equipment than you would in a steam gauge plane without a failure. Is there a program available outside of an airplane that you can sit and study the glass cockpit syllabus or whatever in other words get the basics without being in an airplane and have an instruction in it and how many hours actually do you feel you need to be taking to be introduced to glass cockpit properly? I think that's a very personal question for everyone we have seen it varies it's very personal for whomever the client is and what their background and experiences and what they bring if they have GPS experience and there are several products out there designed to get people up to speed in the glass cockpit before they go fly it every one of the manufacturers has things on their website some are for free and some you can purchase some are CDs or DVDs and most of them now have a free download on their website that you can click and play with on the computer just to get yourself oriented with the screens and the buttons and what happens when you press every button and so forth and we have links to all those on our website as well at www.flyplatinum.com there's links to most some of those simulators as well I'll hand you one after we're done anybody else? yes go ahead I wrote these down while you were talking is there a difference in pilot attitude between the owner and the renter and if there is how do you handle that yeah I would say so you need to warn owners not to get too comfortable you know when you fly the same plane all day every day it's going to be real easy to get lazy about checklist procedures and that's the biggest thing I look for with an owner pilot is to try to balance them not doing that and decision making skills too we see with the owners that are more comfortable with their aircraft that they feel that they wear and that they fly every week on business trips or family outings or what not we see them get a little lax I think on respecting the weather respecting some of the decision making skills that we've worked really hard with on them same thing well thank you all for coming give this gentleman a card that he wanted I fell asleep about half way through here you go