Okay...I was just curious..I do hope to have an Inst. and potentially a CSEL and CFI someday. I think it would be fun to practice ILS approaches once I get my PPL.
Do you really need a safety pilot if you are doing it in VFR conditions without a hood? I mean, sure, you can't actually LOG the approach, but I don't see why you can't FLY it!
No you don't need a SP unless you're wearing a view limiting device (whether or not you are IR'd makes no difference) and it's perfectly legal to fly any approach in VMC (without an IFR clearance) without an IR.
That's not true at all. One of the most valuable exercises in instrument training is to fly an approach with eyes wide open. IMO it's the second best method training for overcoming the tendency to overcorrect.
Having once tried that myself, I'm here to tell you that you'll get your head buried in the cockpit and become oblivious to other traffic. Bring along someone else to keep a lookout while you tinker with the knobs.
Then find one who is familiar with the unit. Not many boxes out there for which you can't find an experienced instructor who knows it.
You find that good instructor, and s/he'll probably have a PC laptop which can run it.
I don't doubt that that will happen to some people, and if you're not confident in your ability to keep scanning for traffic, then you should take a safety pilot along. I believe I said that in so many words. On the other hand, it seems a bit arrogant to declare that everyone will have the same experience that YOU had, don't you think?
It all depends on what lengths you're willing to go to. Certainly there are CNX-80 experts, but I was unable to find any in my area. Sure I could have traveled to California or paid an instructor's travel and lodging expenses to come here, but that gets very expensive. So I joined an online users group, bought Keith Thomassen's book, and spent a lot of time reading, asking questions, and trying different things out. It took a little longer, but it worked out.
Again, what I said was that if someone has a simulator, it would be a cheaper way to experiment than flying the plane. If I have to pay an outstate instructor's expenses plus hourly or daily rate to get access to a simulator, then again, maybe it's a quicker and even better way to learn the unit (depending on one's learning style). But it's definitely not cheaper, and even if we never set foot in the airplane and did all of the familiarization using the PC sim, it would probably be a good bit more expensive that way than the way I did it.
Did I say it was hard?
Did I say it was hard?
Actually I agree with you, it's NOT that hard, which also makes it difficult to justify paying an AMU per day for help with learning the basics. The ONLY thing about its operation that gave me trouble at first was the fact that the 480 knows about NoPT segments but not TAAs, so if you load an RNAV approach with the IF/IAF as the initial fix, it will send you around the HILPT no matter what direction you're coming from. The workaround posted on gns480users works but is more complicated than necessary if you have the latest software revision. I had to figure that out for myself, but again, it was not a big deal.
I didn't complain about any category of approach, just pointed out a minor idiosyncrasy of the 480 that took some getting used to at first. And whether it's just a few approaches or a lot doesn't matter when the approach into your home base with the lowest minimums happens to be one of them. (Though anyway, I thought TAAs were becoming more and more common?)
I suppose there are those more proficient and capable than a 10,000-hour ATP/CFI who's been flying professionally for four decades, and perhaps they'll do better. However, after having done this myself and watched many others try, I doubt it. But, as always, YMMV.
It has nothing to do with proficiency or capability. You're VFR. You don't NEED the friggin' GPS. If it does something you don't understand, you don't try to figure it out that minute. You fly the airplane, keep looking for traffic, and sort it out later, on the ground.
Then I guess you agree with my original statement that you don't want to go up solo to teach yourself how to run a new piece of avionics up in the air.
Huh?
Yes, I know there is a "simulator mode" that you enter with some magic incantation. I tried it once or twice in the airplane, but that was early on, before I had any kind of battery charger (now I use a Battery Minder, not sure if that can supply enough electrons to replace the ones taken by the 480). The real lure of simulator mode was in the idea of taking the unit home to play with it. I lost interest in that idea after the shop that replaced my spar carrythrough reinstalled the 480 without seating it properly, leading to an "interesting" failure where I first lost the ability to control the transponder, then the COM frequency. When I thought about reseating it myself I realized just how expensive it would be if I accidentally damaged one of the pins.
Sort of. There are TSO's and AC's covering how they function in terms of things like when they shift from enroute to terminal to approach, and what CDI sensitivities they use in different modes, but not how their user interfaces ("switchology") work. That's the big problem jumping from, say, a Garmin 155XL to a King KLN-94 to an Apollo/UPSAT GX-series unit.
