Pilot Mike’s Weblog

According to a post on AOPA’s Pilot Blog, Olathe, KS based Garmin has finally won over the last big hold out in the certified aircraft market — Cirrus Design.

According to the post by Tom Haines, the G1000 (Perspective Option) does have some unique to Cirrus (for now) features including: Impressively large dual 12-inch displays, Garmin’s recently announced synthetic vision technology (SVT) and several crew alerting messages.

Another cool little feature Tom mentioned is: “…a blue “LVL” button on the GFC 700 autopilot mode controller. The LVL button is a pilot’s get-out-of-jail-free card when things are starting to go bad. Simply push the LVL button and no matter what mode the autopilot is in or even if it is off, the autopilot will roll the wings level and hold altitude.”

I am a little bit late to post on this, but according to the April 8th AOPA ePilot, Garmin has announced Synthetic Vision Technology (SVT) for their G1000 platform. SVT will allow for a 3D view of of terrain as you would see it on a VFR day. The best part? It is just a software upgrade, no additional hardware is required — a rare find in the world of avionics.

AOPA has posted a First Look video clip here. Of local Kansas City Interest, note the sample approach in the video is an approach into Lawrence, Kansas (KLWC).

Enjoy the show…try to keep the drool off the keyboard.