To my surprise, my flight school recently received a brand new Diamond DA20 equipped with the Garmin G500 glass cockpit. Apart from flight sim, I have no glass time but I’m pleased to say that I’ve fallen in love.

Aside from this new aircraft, the only other glass cockpits reside on the DA40’s at my flight school, which rent for close to $200/hour. Needless to say, I’ll stick with the $145/hour DA20 even if it means the old six pack steam gauges. But now I have another option and I’m sure it’s going to be tough to get rental time on it.

The G500 is the little brother to the G1000 system that Garmin is famous for. It’s not as complicated and is only certified on single and multi-engine aircraft under 6,000 lbs. It consists of two 6.5 inch LCD displays: the Primary Flight Display (PFD) on the left and the Multifunction Display (MFD) on the right. Between these two displays, pretty much every bit of flight information imaginable is at your finger tips… at least that’s what it seems like to a low time Garmin virgin like myself!

The G500 grabs it’s GPS information from the GNS430 which is something I’m already used to. This is the GPS/avionics system installed on the other DA20’s at our flight school. All in all, it’s quite the system. I’m sure that when I get a chance to fly the DA40’s, I will marvel at the awesomeness of the G1000, but for now, the G500 will do just fine.

So how is it to fly with the G500? Well it’s a bit weird getting used to. I found myself wanting to look at the standby instruments because they were what I was used to looking at. I find that executing manoeuvres such as steep turns are a little bit trickier as well. I’ve got to be switching my view from outside to inside and then to back outside, but I find myself searching for where to look on the displays. I’m not completely comfortable yet with the system but it will come in time. Navigating your way around the various options is pretty simple to do. It’s the same sort of system on the GNS 430 which utilizes scroll wheels to change fields. I’ll have to explore all of the options one day when I have the time because there’s so many of them (traffic alerting, terrain alerting, synthetic terrain vision, etc.)

To end on a completely unrelated note, here is an audio file I came across recently. It’s old but it’s still funny. Enjoy. Cockpit Announcement