Diamond Star DA40/G1000 trip report

My friend Tom and I made it back from London, Ontario in his new 2006 Diamond Star DA40 with Garmin G1000 glass cockpit. The design has improved a bit since my 2002 DA40 was built. Interior noise with the front vents closed is down to 88 dbA in front and 85-87 dBA in back depending on power setting (still way too loud to get yuppies out of their SUVs; will someone PLEASE make a quiet general aviation airplane?).

 

It was interesting to compare the Cirrus’s Avidyne glass cockpit, which is a couple of years older in design, to the fancy new Garmin.

 

Here are some things that I like a lot about the Garmin installation in the DA40:

 

 

• you have a custom settings memory for individual pilots; I would use this to store “philip-ifr” and “philip-vfr”. VFR Philip wants airspace alerts. IFR Philip doesn’t want to be bothered with 10 strident warnings while transitioning through the cone of Bravo airspace
• the audio panel, part of the G1000, has a “playback” button that plays back the last handful of calls from the radio (JFK, Jr. had a similar device in his Piper Saratoga, which led conspiracy theorists to talk about his plane being equipped with a cockpit voice recorder, like an airliner, and why weren’t the recordings recoverable? (possibly because his device cost $300))
• the airspeed tape has little adjacent v-speed bugs for Vx, Vy, best-slide, etc. (though sadly, though the Garmin has a fuel totalizer and could let you enter the weight of your passengers, the G1000 does not compute these for you and adjust them in flight)
• the multi-function display (MFD) displays an endurance circle of all the places you can go before running down to 45 minutes of fuel and a wider one of the places you can glide to with empty tanks; this “circle” is actually stretched out of shape depending on the winds alot
• you can switch the system from showing magnetic headings to true, critical for doing approaches in the Arctic and simply not possible with the Avidyne
• the primary flight display (PFD) offers an inset map that can show traffic, terrain, or just waypoints and the flight plan right next to the HSI
• the A/P gives you voice “leaving altitude” alerts, unlike the Cirrus
• lots of dedicated, single-purpose knobs, e.g., one knob that always does heading (unlike the Avidyne where the knobs’ functions are modal)
• soft keys, a first for Garmin and long overdue

 

Things I didn’t love:

 

 

• the fuel tank gauges are small, about the same size as the ammeter and other non-critical gauges (i.e., not prominent enough considering the dire consequences of running out of fuel); there is no digital readout of the fuel quantity in the two tanks unless you use the soft keys to go down a page
• the engine gauges display manifold pressure and prop speed, but not % of engine power, as the Avidyne E-Max system does on the Cirrus; in the Diamond you are supposed to pull out the paper owner’s manual and leaf through it to calculate the percent power
• all of the fancy screens give you no vertical guidance on approaches; this doesn’t really matter for an ILS, but for a non-precision approach it would be so useful to have a text readout “you’ve passed the FOBAR waypoint, now you can descend to 2000′ MSL”
• approach plates are not available for the MFD, so you need to buy paper books
• I didn’t see any Victor airways on the MFD, so you need to buy paper en-route charts
• (the combination of the preceding three factors makes the entire G1000 not much more useful than a handheld GPS in a 1965 Cessna 172, though it is undeniably slicker)
• the inset map on the PFD is stuck at the same orientation as the big map on the MFD; this prevents you from having one map “north up” (for communication with ATC when they ask for your position relative to other stuff) and one map “track up” (for figuring out where stuff is relative to where you are going); an Avidyne/Garmin 430 system would typically have four moving maps (waypoints inset into the HSI on the PFD, fixed at Track Up; big MFD map, smaller maps on each of the two 430s, all three of the latter configurable track up or north up)
• Diamond is still selling the King KAP140 autopilot, which is not very well integrated with the G1000. The G1000 has an altitude bug, for example, whose setting is not communicated to the A/P. There are three places to set the altimeter (PFD, backup steam gauge altimeter, A/P). The actual A/P settings are not displayed on the PFD. You actually can’t tell if the A/P is engaged or not unless you look down at the physical unit (compare to the Cirrus/Avidyne/S-Tec where the S-Tec takes its vertical speed and altitude goals from the PFD and the A/P settings are repeated right above the attitude indicator) — unlike the Cirrus, the DA40 is an easy plane to hand-fly and it is very suitable for a trainer where you don’t want the student using the A/P all the time
• the user interface overall is very complex and involves a lot of cursor-knob-enter or cursor-knob-cursor action; with the Avidyne/Garmin 430 combo at least the miserable and confusing part of flying is limited to stuff you do on the 430; the Avidyne soft keys and knobs are very simple
• soft keys (also a plus, above), because some things are available after you bring up the Menu and others only on the soft keys, so now you have an extra place to remember to look
• the wind vector; on the Avidyne this shows up next to the HSI so you can see how it relates to where you are trying to go and it reads out in magnetic direction and speed so you can give Flightwatch a professional-quality pilot report; on the Garmin it is stuck into the inset or MFD map and the direction is not available as a number
• the en-route safe altitude is not displayable for the area that you’re in, but only the maximum ESA for the entire route you’ve said that you’re going to fly; this could be unsettling for a long IFR flight because the G1000 will show that you need to be thousands of feet higher than you are to avoid terrain
• the documentation is poor and reads as though it was written by someone who had never flown an airplane; a lot of material in the thick pilot’s guide is tautological and uninformative, e.g., “you use this to switch the CDI intercept from auto to manual” with no explanation of the consequence of either setting (one solution is to go through the King Schools training system on DVD-ROM, which I tried and found much more useful than the Garmin manual)

 

Things that might be broken or I couldn’t figure out:

 

 

• the COM 1/2 split switch had no effect at all (this is supposed to put the copilot on COM2 and the pilot on COM1 for transmit/receive)
• the side tone was almost inaudible to me when the pilot (Tom) was transmitting to ATC

 

At the end of the day, I was surprised that Garmin had not taken better advantage of the two years it had to study all the things that are good and bad about the Avidyne.

 

Oh yes… time to short Boeing stock (and buy ERJ?). I went up to Canada on one of the newest Embraer 175 regional jets with more than 100 seats (but no middle seats; 2×2 all the way down through Coach). It seems like a great airplane, just as good as Boeing 737 for most passengers, but presumably for a fraction of the cost to buy and operate.