Questions for you glass-panel folks

On Wed, 5 Mar 2008 13:36:53 -0800 (PST), xyzzy
wrote:

On Mar 5, 1:05 pm, "Jay Honeck" wrote:
2. Assuming that it is, has the FAA considering a new, simplified
curriculum
for obtaining an IR in a glass cockpit?

Until there is zero possibility of things going tango-uniform, and you
ending up using the backup steam gauges, I seriously doubt the FAA will
reduce the requirements.

Simplifying doesn't necessarily mean a reduction in requirements. Rather, I
am wondering if they will change the required tests to more accurately
reflect the reality of flying a glass cockpit plane.

If I'm remembering correctly, the lion's share of the written test covered
VOR and NDB interpretation. After flying the G1000, it seems that testing a
student on his ability to chase needles on a VOR would be like requiring all
new computer programmers to learn Cobol.

A better analogy would be requiring all new computer programmers to
learn assembler, which as far as I know they still do. You still have
to learn the basics before you can learn the modern stuff.

Not that I know of. I earned my BS degree in CS (graduated in 90 and
*started* on my Masters) At that time Assembler was not required. OTOH
I took a course in microprocessor design and programming that was in
machine language. We had to use the Assembly Language "bingo Card" to
look up the code and then convert to Hex. We entered everything in
Hex (into volatile memory) and were expected to run the program, get
the proper results and exit gracefully. Then the instructor would run
it again.:-)) We even had to do addition by rotating left and right
in the registers and physically manipulate (write to and read from)
the stacks when doing procedure calls and returns. "GoTos" were not
allowed.

The final exam was a two parter. The first was 50 questions. 10 were
T&F, the rest either took calculations or an essay answer. The second
half was to write a fairly sizeable program in Assembler. I think it
took about 7 pages of instructions. Couple guys handed theirs in
while I was only about half done. I was almost ready to panic except I
found they had given up. Made it through the whole course only to
give up half way through the final exam.

That was one of the courses I aced.:-)) Let's not talk about
networks and calculating bandwidth for a given string at a given speed
though.:-)) Lots of Calculus there. In Grad school I took two
courses and taught 5 as a GA. The first was the Design and Analysis
of Algorithms while the second was Digital Image Processing. The
first was easy. We only went to 5 level simultaneous equations. By
the second week in the image processing we were already using Fourier
Analysis (Not FF) and from there is was all down hill.:-))
Fortunately A very good job offer came along about that time.

However with CS as in GPS you do have to crawl before you can walk.
they still start out with Pascal to teach "top down" and structure,
but move to C++ early on.
Roger Halstead (K8RI & ARRL life member)
(N833R, S# CD-2 Worlds oldest Debonair)
www.rogerhalstead.com