DA40 with g1000 or C182 with steam gauges for IR

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Wild Turkey

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Wild Turkey
Hello all,

Long time reader, first time poster. I'm a recently minted PP with about 110 hrs, all in C172s. I'm thinking of joining a flying club with an older C182 with a Garmin 430 and a DA40 with a G1000. I'm planning on getting my IR and was wondering if the forum had any advice on whether it would be better to do this with.

Would it be better to learn with the steam gauges so I'm comfortable with flying ifr without the G1000, then transitioning, or vice versa. If I learn on the G1000, will I be less comfortable without it?

Thanks for your advice on this. I read posts on here since I was a student and have learned a lot.
 
which plane do you anticipate flying most after your training is complete? If you know, my advice is to train in that one.
Wild Turkey said:
Hello all,

Long time reader, first time poster. I'm a recently minted PP with about 110 hrs, all in C172s. I'm thinking of joining a flying club with an older C182 with a Garmin 430 and a DA40 with a G1000. I'm planning on getting my IR and was wondering if the forum had any advice on whether it would be better to do this with.

Would it be better to learn with the steam gauges so I'm comfortable with flying ifr without the G1000, then transitioning, or vice versa. If I learn on the G1000, will I be less comfortable without it?

Thanks for your advice on this. I read posts on here since I was a student and have learned a lot.
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I would say that if you ever plan to fly IFR in the steam-gauge 182, to get your IR in the 182. Once you have your IR on the steam gauges and are proficient with the G430, the transition to the Diamond and the G1000 will be very quick.

Our club also has a steam-gauge 182 and a G1000 Diamond (Where are you? Maybe it's the same one! :D) and we've had quite a few people make the 182-to-DA40 transition since we bought the Diamond about 1.5 years ago, usually in not much more than the club minimum 5 hours. I know that personally, it took me about 45 minutes under the hood to wrap my mind around having tapes instead of dials, and after that it felt natural.

However, going the other way is not easy. If you learn on the G1000 and need to switch to the steam gauges, you practically might as well be starting your instrument rating over again. It's not quite that bad - procedures won't change, and the flying techniques themselves won't change - but the process of building the picture in your head of what is going on is much more difficult with steam gauges and is probably not very easy to develop if you've been having it practically spoon-fed to you the way the G1000 does.

Either way, the 182 and DA40 are both fine airplanes, I've enjoyed ours thoroughly. Good luck! :yes:
 
Instrument Flying Handbook suggests starting with steam.
 
Actually, flyingcheesehead, it is your club. I'm still deciding whether to join. How has your experience been?
 
Wild Turkey said:
Actually, flyingcheesehead, it is your club. I'm still deciding whether to join. How has your experience been?
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Excellent! I've been in the club for over 7 years now, and even after moving to Milwaukee a couple of years ago, I find it's still worth the drive.

If I may offer another suggestion: Do your IR in the Archer. Since we pay by tach time, and you'll be at reduced power settings most of the time while working on your IR (plowing along at 90 knots, whee!), you'll save a ton of money doing it that way. While shooting approaches, figure somewhere in the range of 1.3-1.4 hours of time logged for every hour you pay for.

In the Archer, 90 knots and level will be at about 2000 RPM. In the 182, it'll be about 20"/2300 and in the Diamond about 18"/2300. You'll end up paying the full rate in the Diamond and pretty close to full rate in the 182, or around $140/hr (in the air, anyway) while in the Archer you'll be around $85-90/hr... I have personal experience with all the tachs. ;)

The other matter is scheduling - Since the 182 and DA40 are faster airplanes, they get used for trips a lot whereas it's pretty rare for the Archer to leave town. If you want to schedule 2-3x/week and not have to take breaks, the Archer will be the easiest to consistently schedule as well. If you try to do the IR in the 182 or Diamond, you might have to skip an entire week or 10 days here and there if someone goes on a trip.

I'll PM you my phone number, I'd be happy to chat with you if you have any other questions. I did most of my IR in the Archer and have over 100 hours in both the Archer and the Diamond and over 400 hours in the 182.

Kent
 
wabower said:
which plane do you anticipate flying most after your training is complete? If you know, my advice is to train in that one.
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I'm with Wayne. Otherwise, it's pretty much a coin toss. Just keep in mind that there's a lot more to learn with the G1000 (especially if you haven't been to school on it already), and that can lengthen the IR training process.
 
Kent's Archer idea is nifty.

Kent what's wrong with your 182 that it takes 20" to go 90 knots!?

Holy cow man, I was doing over 100 knots with 10 flaps out today at 18" in mine. Prop may have been up at top of the green at 2450, though.

No other answer to add. The other posters are right... fly whatever you are going to fly the most later. "Train like you fight" as they say.
 
Another "Which one you gonna fly most?" If the G-1000 has SVT and you're ever gonna fly the 182 IFR, I'd train in the 182 because otherwise you won't be able to fly on steam in IMC. The shame is the 182 is a much nicer IFR platform IMO, the DA 40 is all over the place in any kind of turbulence. The saving grace is it's a stick so all the correcting isn't as much work. I found the DA-40 very tiring to fly in IMC.
 
Henning said:
If the G-1000 has SVT and you're ever gonna fly the 182 IFR, I'd train in the 182 because otherwise you won't be able to fly on steam in IMC.
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I'm not sure what research Henning's seen that I haven't, but Dr. Paul Craig's work at MTSU indicates otherwise. They found virtually no difference in transition training time for students who did PP and IR in G1000 DA-40's transitioning to otherwise-identical "steam gauge" DA-40's and students who did PP and IR in the steam gauges and then going to G1000.
 
I saw research indicating there was a difference, and age seemed to matter most. Don't recall where but it was reasoned that younger pilots tended to perform better on glass than older pilots with all other factors normalized.
 
Ron Levy said:
I'm not sure what research Henning's seen that I haven't, but Dr. Paul Craig's work at MTSU indicates otherwise. They found virtually no difference in transition training time for students who did PP and IR in G1000 DA-40's transitioning to otherwise-identical "steam gauge" DA-40's and students who did PP and IR in the steam gauges and then going to G1000.
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I highly doubt that sampling was taken with SVT, it was done with old style interpretive instrument display. With SVT you never learn the interpretation because the representation is natural and needs none.
 
Jaybird180 said:
I saw research indicating there was a difference, and age seemed to matter most. Don't recall where but it was reasoned that younger pilots tended to perform better on glass than older pilots with all other factors normalized.
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Please y'all gotta understand that "Glass" comes in 2 varieties, standard 2D pixelated version of what's been around for 3/4rs of a century, longer than the engines y'all complain about being dinosaur crap technology. Then there is SVT which is a 3D representation that basically gives you a VFR flight sim view of outside with your speed and altitude on the sides. There is no confusion, there is no cross referencing 8 different items on the panel to figure out where you are and in what attitude.

Granted, the interpretation itself for control is pretty well mastered in a couple of hours, however melding that into a situation combining situational awareness and adaptation to directions from ATC, that takes more. I'd say a sharp 100hr pilot who had flown nothing but an SVT DA-40 and had just passed his IR would take 3hrs to be competent and 15 to be comfortable flying on a non SVT G-1000 DA-40, that is if they ever feel comfortable behind one in IMC after having experienced SVT.
 
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I did my IR training on a steam gauge 182S with KAP 140 and flew that for about 2 yrs before we bought a DA40 with the G1000 and the KAP 140 last year.

After spending time with the dual screen sim, it took about 3 hrs of instruction to be just competent and 10 hrs to be comfortable in IMC.

I concur with others who said that it's best to train on the plane you're going to fly and switching back and forth is not desirable. Also agree that the 182 makes a more stable IMC platform but in my opinion, the G1000 makes a safer IMC platform.

Marc
 
There are 50-60+ years worth of airplanes still flying around IFR, some even older.

Getting the scan down and being proficient in steam gauges allows you to fly just about anything IFR. Being proficient in glass cockpit limits that. Id suggest doing of IR in the 182 as the glass cockpit transition later on will be an easier one.
 
lr60plt said:
There are 50-60+ years worth of airplanes still flying around IFR, some even older.

Getting the scan down and being proficient in steam gauges allows you to fly just about anything IFR. Being proficient in glass cockpit limits that. Id suggest doing of IR in the 182 as the glass cockpit transition later on will be an easier one.
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Mine is 50 with glass, I'm not the Lone Ranger idiotic enough to upgrade. If/when we get Owner Exp steam panels will disappear. As it is now, I agree though, unless you own a SVT plane or are going to be flying it exclusively for IFR, it's still going to be best to learn on steam.
 
L.Adamson said:
Who wrote it, and WHEN?

Besides being possibly dated, I always prefer to know the mindset of the authors.
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Faceless, nameless FAA employees wrote it; online version from FAA website is dated 2008.

When the FAA realized at long last that their publications were hopelessly outdated (think Instrument Flight Handbook, Flight Training Handbook, both dated 1980) they farmed the rewrite job out to the industry. ASA got the contract for several of them, and I wrote a couple of chapters for the Instrument Flying Handbook. Jeppesen got a couple of contracts as well. With the rewrites in print and the publications brought up-to-date, the FAA re-assumed responsibility. What you see today is their product.

Bob Gardner
 
I did my IFR training in a DA40 w/G1000 and SVT. I now have 600+ hours in that plane with plenty of IMC time. There is no way I am qualified to fly a six pack in IMC. I have no idea how long it would take be to be proficient in a 6 pack and while I have no desire to find out, if for some reason I felt the need, I would start with a CFII right from the beginning.

For some reason I don't think it's the mental picture that would be the hard part. An iPad/GPS/moving map solves that problem pretty easily. Keeping the needles centered in a crosswind would take a little practice but not much since I fly plenty of practice approaches using the diamonds instead of the rectangles. I think the hard part would be all the little stuff like flying a DME arc, setting up the missed etc. that can provide a fatal distraction if not automatic and that SVT makes dirt simple.

My advice would be to learn on a six pack if you plan on flying one. Don't learn on SVT unless that's all you plan on flying. And lastly, while I may be biased, certified SVT (not iPad SVT) really is a big leap forward in safety for instrument approaches when used responsibly.
 
Wingsofglass said:
while I may be biased, certified SVT (not iPad SVT) really is a big leap forward in safety for instrument approaches when used responsibly.
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It is the biggest leap in IFR flight safety since Elmer Sperry made his gyros.
 
Henning

Pick up a copy of May 2012 Twin Cessna Flyer for a positive article on old 310's that would be good for prospective buyers of your airplane. Written by the owner of a G (1962) airplane with updated glass panel.

Henning said:
It is the biggest leap in IFR flight safety since Elmer Sperry made his gyros.
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wabower said:
Henning

Pick up a copy of May 2012 Twin Cessna Flyer for a positive article on old 310's that would be good for prospective buyers of your airplane. Written by the owner of a G (1962) airplane with updated glass panel.
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I'll try to pick up a copy, thanks.
 
Thanks for all the advice. Flyingcheesehead, I've decided to join and sent my application today.

I think I'd like to fly both the 182 and th da40 ifr at some point. Using the archer sounds like the less expensive route for sure. However, I think I'd be flying the 182 more in ifr than the archer. I'll have to decide once I've flown in them a little bit.

It sounds like learning on the steam gauges will be a better idea. I'm pretty good with tech so the transition to g1000 shouldn't be too bad.

Excited to start flying some new planes!
 
Henning said:
Then there is SVT which is a 3D representation that basically gives you a VFR flight sim view of outside with your speed and altitude on the sides.
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...and if your engine quits in the clag, your autopilot will fly you into the side of a mountain and you can watch it happen on the G1000.
 
flyingron said:
...and if your engine quits in the clag, your autopilot will fly you into the side of a mountain and you can watch it happen on the G1000.
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Getting back to seriousness.....

A few years back, there was an article titled something along the lines of " A case for a Garmin". An aircraft suffered engine failure in IMC over mountains. They were able to glide on the downhill side, but hit a rise in terrain, that could have been avoided, had they known that they could have flown to either side. If they HAD the Garmin GPS with terrain databases............it would have easily shown the terrain rise directly ahead.

As to myself, I know this technology works. I've flown extensively in mountain regions, and compare GPS terrain data to actual. I've overflown numerous " CFIT crash" sites, in which a terrain depicting GPS could have easily made the difference.

L.Adamson
 
flyingron said:
...and if your engine quits in the clag, your autopilot will fly you into the side of a mountain and you can watch it happen on the G1000.
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Or you can turn it off and point for what represents as the most likely place to find a landable situation. Then there's people like me who don't have to worry because we have no AP.
 
denverpilot said:
Kent's Archer idea is nifty.

Kent what's wrong with your 182 that it takes 20" to go 90 knots!?

Holy cow man, I was doing over 100 knots with 10 flaps out today at 18" in mine. Prop may have been up at top of the green at 2450, though.

No other answer to add. The other posters are right... fly whatever you are going to fly the most later. "Train like you fight" as they say.
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I typically only need about 16" with 10 degrees of flaps to maintain 90 when I fly a 182 on the occasional photo flight.
 
Which one would John Wayne fly?
 
denverpilot said:
Kent what's wrong with your 182 that it takes 20" to go 90 knots!?
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Probably that my fat @$$ is sitting in it. ;)

Or that I misremembered the setting... I usually don't fly approaches at 90 knots in it since we have a huge mix of traffic at the home 'drome and chances are there's a jet on my tail. I'd fly an unfamiliar non-precision approach at 90 knots, but at home it's cruise power down the ILS at 140 knots to 325 AGL (1-mile final) before putting the brakes on.
 
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