Dave S wrote:
John Theune wrote:
Bottom line is
that this was a modified system and to hold garmin responsible and use
that are a reason not to have advanced avionics is not good idea.

John

To the contrary.. ferry tanks are are NOT UNCOMMON and this is a
foreseable modification. This is something that should have been
contemplated.. if not by the manufacturer then by the ferry tank
installer/STC holder.

Bottom line is.. a faulty fuel gauge for whatever reason should never
ever cause your whole damn flight instrumentation and display to crash
and reboot. This is a simple, fundamental idea

Dave
Your right it should not cause the system to reboot but the question is
who fault was it? Was it the sensor that exceeded it's valid output
values do to a improper installation of non standard equipment? Where
in the garmin code did it blow up? I can imagine that the fuel level
value is used in many places in the code. Was it a minor sub-system
that got modified and had a dependencies creep in that was not foreseen?
To try and test a integrated device like the G1000 with all the inputs
out of valid range is a non-trivial test and it would not surprise me to
find out in the end that this whole mess was caused by a modification to
a subsystem that used the fuel value that was not part of the system
when ( and If ) the testing was done with all the values out of range.
What operating system does the G1000 use? Does it use a OS that
seperates the various processes that control functions or is it a single
large program that can reboot if a process goes into a unrecoverable
error. I don't know the answers to these questions but I'm willing to
bet that there are a number of engineers at Garmin trying to figure out
what the hell went wrong here.


To clarify my earlier post: Go ahead and blame Garmin ( which may or
may not be right ) but don't use this failure as a reason not to have
advanced avionics in aircraft.