"Andrey Serbinenko" wrote in message
...
A few years ago, I remember reading an excellent book on general design of
modern avionics. In particular, one thing that I believe is different
between
Garmin's baby and what they have in B-s and A-s is redundancy. The whole
thing
there is doubled, and some critical components are tripled. And then
there's
a whole body of software that takes care of voting-elimination among
inputs.
By design, the event of the computer reboot (i.e. all three redundant
computers
reboot) is perhaps as likely as the event of all four engines quitting at
the
same time. What surprises me is that Garmin got FAA approval for such a
system,
whereas it doesn't even come close to what "normal" glass cockpit is
supposed
to be like in terms of robustness of system design. I understand it's all
done
in the name of affordability, but this is clearly a dangerous game to
play.

If you think about it, just to be able to claim any kind of "robustness",
you should be reasonably sure that there's no single failure that will
take
the whole system out, right? And there we go: excessive fuel venting took
airspeed indicator out completely, and CO indication out completely. And
this
is aside from any software bugs; this is the way G1000 is supposed to work
by design!

So, I guess my point is: you can't just take a steam-gauge-type airplane,
replace all the individual *independent* instrument systems with one
electronic box, and claim you've got an equally reliable plane. No way. By
tying everything together and establishing inter-system dependencies that
never existed before, you increase your likelihood of a catastrophic
failure
by orders of magnitude. If you want to use an all-in-one instrument
system,
you need to redesign the airplane and fit it with redundant systems to
compensate for that loss of overall reliability.

The G1000 system If you buy one or intend to fly one in the Soup be current
and really proficient on you partial panel skill because in the event of a
G1000 failure or even partial failure you will be left with and Compass,
Altimeter, Attitude Indicator, and Airspeed Indicator and a bunch of useless
knobs and buttons or questionable reading from a partial failure. It's
almost an IFR pilots worst nightmare yea a Vacuum and Electrical System
Failure as when the G1000 goes radios, navigation, & transponder go along
with it!

I don't think it would cost Cessna much $$$ to put some manual back up
instruments in the panel even if they are the small ones they already charge
to much for a skyhawk why not add 3k or 4k if even that much to the price
and add some redundancy to the system!