(Nathan Young) wrote:
Your statements that the GPS lags dangerously are inaccurate (at least
wrt to the Garmin 295). The HSI updates quick enough to show heading
changes of a few degrees as long as the bank angle is kept under a
reasonable amount, say 10 degrees. Easy to do in smooth or light
turbulence.

A friend of mine and me tried an experiement once. I put our Archer
into some unusual attitudes, and he recovered using just the synthetic
instruments on his handheld GPS (Garmin something-or-other, might have
been the 295 but I'm not sure). Conditions were night VFR, no
turbulence.

What we discovered was that the pitch information you get from the ASI,
VSI, and AI was pretty much worthless, but heading info was useful.
When he tried to level the pitch, he just ended up chasing the
instruments badly. If he ignored pitch (let the trim take care of it)
and just used rudder to zero out rate of turn on the synthetic TC, he
did pretty well.

The Archer is a pretty stable plane. I have no idea how well this would
have worked in something like a Bonanza. I also have no idea how well
it would have worked in turbulence. We were also assuming that the
plane had previously been trimmed for level flight and the power and
trim settings hadn't changed. With something like runaway trim, this
would have obviously been much harder (I'm guessing impossible).