32 MAY 2020 ÇPlane&Pilot
HOW WE GOT HERE
Light aviation as we know it today is a segment
that depends heavily upon the existence of more
than 100,000 older airplanes. The majority of
these were built during the two-decade-plus-
long heyday of GA, from the mid-to late 1950s
to around 1980, during which time historic
demographic, political and market forces com-
bined to create a vibrant ecosystem of small,
piston-engine-powered light planes flown by
active pilots. These aviators grew up as WWII
was playing out and came of age in time to buy
affordable, plentiful new single- and twin-engine
airplanes manufactured by a number of thriving
small aircraft manufacturers.
As time went on and making new aircraft
became more and expensive, sales of newly
manufactured light planes dried up. This was in
large part because the planes that were built dur-
ing the 1960s and 1970s, many of which were 10
years old or less, became an unbeatable deal for
would-be owners. And the fewer new planes that
manufacturers turned out, the more expensive
each one was to build.
At the same time, by the mid-to-late 1980s,
the pilot population was shrinking, and those
used planes, still plentiful and fairly young,
many of them with very low hours, dominated
the segment. By the mid-1990s, existing planes
accounted for as much as 90% of the aircraft
marketplace, a state of affairs that has persisted
until recent years. To complicate matters, unlike
in the automotive world, where technology and
improved reliability have continued to drive new
sales, existing small plane models were (and
still are) substantially similar to the new planes
that are being built, ostensibly to replace their
aging predecessors.
Things have changed of late. The fleet has
continued to shrink substantially as planes are
wrecked, scrapped or otherwise age out of the
fleet. In addition, the truth is that used planes
aren’t the deal they used to be. They’re going up
in price as their numbers decline, and as much
as we’d like to believe differently, age affects
everything, from housing to our own health, in
undesirable ways—and airplanes are hardly the
exception to that rule. Time takes its toll on every
component and system, from the fuel filler caps
to exhaust stacks. And maintenance ain’t cheap.
It’s important to consider that new light planes
aren’t all that different from their 40-year-old
predecessors. They can’t be. Most “new” mod-
els are built based on decades-old type certifi-
cates. While manufacturers do work in improve-
ments over time, most of them, from seat beltsto sun visors, can be updated, often relatively
cheaply, too.
The aircraft’s flight instruments, however,
have stood largely frozen in time, with few viable
replacement options. In most cases, owners of
older airplanes could only grit their teeth and pay
to keep the old gear going for as long as possible.SOLUTIONS
With the advent of the Garmin GI 275, a big
part of that equation has changed. It’s true that
Garmin’s own G5 flight instruments (HSI and
AI) are popular and even less costly solutions
to analog instrument replacement, but the GI
275 goes far beyond the G5’s capabilities, and
considering its ease of installation, it will give
the G5 a run for its money.
There are, in fact, a number of different GI
275s, and it’s quite possible to replace the func-
tions of all six instruments in the classic six
pack—attitude, altitude, vertical speed, airspeed,
heading and rate of turn—with fewer than six
instruments, as some incarnations of the GI
275 perform multiple functions. The primary
attitude instrument, for example (in essence
a mini primary flight display), shows attitude,
airspeed, altitude, vertical speed, heading and
more. In addition, it displays navigation inputs,
allowing the pilot to fly a course based on a flight
plan entered in a compatible paired navigator.
In addition, it shows flight path vector and flight
director cues. As small as it is, its powers are
great and many.Garmin's primary display features built-in AHRS and air data
and includes all the critical data of a larger primary flight display.
Synthetic vision is optional but provided on a trial basis.