akiley wrote:
Hi all, We have several club aircraft with the KLN 94 GPS. Is there
still no one making a sim for this GPS? Seems like *SOMEONE* would
fill this gap by now. Like Microsoft, the huge MS sim aftermarket
world, Bendix/King themselves, Elite, anyone? The KLN 94 is in a ton
of Cessna aircraft. First and foremost shame on Bendix/King for not
getting a sim together. I emailed them several times over a year or
two, but they finally dropped the project. I consider it a safety
issue.

I think your best bet is to form an ad-hoc committee to design a
special exercise to use whatever GPS simulator software you have at
hand. I have Jeppesen Flite Pro (now ancient and out-of-print) that uses
a GPS that is unlike my Garmin, so I have suffered what you describe.

Imagine if a few of us got together and figured out how to operate the
Jepp GPS. Then we could mint owr own usage paradigm, based on a few good
local airport approaches, and have a fine club tool to "keep sharp on
the gages".

Personally, I find any kind of PC sim, is the best way to get up to
speed quickly in prep for the real thing. It's going through the
motion of finding the buttons and pressing them in the correct order.
Reading the manual doesn't do this for you. (though reading the
manual is an essential) Garmin has done a great job with the G1000 and
it's now in FSX deluxe version. I read the KLN 94 manual and went up
and flew the real thing yesterday. I had my head down poking at that
thing when I should have been spending more time scanning for traffic.
I knew it pretty well, but if you fly several rental aircraft, you
fumble for the position of the buttons and all the little gotcha's.

De ja vu all over again. You described the problem nicely.

It's probably best to team up in pairs with one always acting as a
saety pilot until you all get familiarized with the KLN94. I have been
waiting for a decade for the FAA to come out with a sylabus on
teaching/training the GPS method, but so far, no-go. In a way, it's
shameful...

Anyway, the "committee" should spend a few hours in the air to develop
the essentials of GPS, especially approaches... There has got to be some
nice pneumonics like "turn, twist, and time" (for holding patterns and
procedure turns).

Angelo Campanella