Curious...what was the cause of the lost comms?
Our maintenance guy was able to reproduce the failure once. Then, it worked thereafter.
All we did was turn on the plane to get going (G2 Cirrus SR20 with avidyne and 430W's x 2).
No popped breakers.
The MFD, Transponder, 430 #2, and radio panel all went dead after takeoff...and stayed dead.
It's a club plane and our maintenance person was going to call cirrus and see if they've heard of this happening before.
FWIW, I called a towered airport as we were passing by, figuring that my handheld could reach them. They coordinated with ATC in MSP. Everyone was super-helpful in getting us back home to our own airport so that we could get the plane looked at. I could hear ATC, but my transmissions were intermittent (due to the crappy connection with the cheap-as-crap headset adapter plug receptacle). ATC, cleverly, asked us to make turns if we heard them (which we did) and helped keep us out of the way of other traffic. It was really cool to get the help and I greatly appreciated it.
They also had me try to call on the cell phone, but those 6 cylinders up front are very, very loud and that was pretty much useless.
My buddy did the flying/navigating and I did the communicating. It was a good learning experience and a good lesson about KNOWING that your back up plan should work before you have to use it. It was also super-helpful to have 2 pilots on board since we could split the tasks and continue to fly safely to our destination. I cant imagine trying to do what we did with only 1 pilot.
Minor lesson learned: if you have to grab your POH from the back pocket of a cirrus, the seat covers sold to protect the seats/cover over worn seats are in the way and make it very difficult to pull the POH binder out since the edge of the binder gets caught on the vinyl cover. The cover should be a lot more snug, IMHO
