By Rob Finfrock

First introduced more than a decade ago, the Garmin G1000 avionics system is widely considered the standard in glass panel technology on a variety of general aviation aircraft, ranging from single-engine pistons to light jets. The G1000 is standard equipment in the Citation Mustang series, with that fleet of approximately 430 aircraft comprising one of the largest G1000 user segments in the market. Avionics systems based on the G1000 are also available for retrofit to legacy Citation models.

CJP-Garmin G1000 Flight Deck Avionics Cessna C510 Mustang

To better understand the needs of this sizable market segment, the CJP G1000 Committee recently surveyed CJP Members about what they most liked about their G1000 systems, and what they felt perhaps needed some improvement. “We wanted to get a sense of what our Membership feels are the most important technical issues when operating their G1000-equipped aircraft, and to categorize their feelings for the system and its features,” said G1000 Committee chairman Marc Dulude. “The committee built this survey to develop a view of the priorities from this group so we can correctly position the items to Cessna and Garmin.”

The survey began by asking how comfortable respondents were with operating the G1000. “For the most part, those surveyed consider themselves very competent and comfortable with flying with the G1000, Dulude noted. “That is a testimonial to the training we receive for the type-rating and recurrent training.

“However,” he added, “a fair number of respondents acknowledged that, while they can handle the tasks required to safely fulfill their mission, they also felt there’s more they should know.”

Respondents were also asked about the G1000 features they most commonly used, and their impressions of their usability. “One surprise was the number of responses to the question, ‘do you use the flight path depiction box feature?'” Dulude said. Part of the synthetic vision system (SVS) available on the G1000, this feature places “highway in the sky” (HITS) flight path boxes on the primary flight display, or PFD.

“I have to admit that I’ve never met anyone who uses [flight path depiction] but a surprising number of our respondents do,” he noted.

Results from the survey, which ran through Feb. 22, will be compiled and presented to Cessna and Garmin to spur future discussions with those OEMs regarding features, quality and reliability, and future software releases.

“I’m anxious to discuss these aggregated findings from CJP Members, and seen how [Cessna and Garmin] wish to proceed with the data,” Dulude concluded.