36 MAY 2020 ÇPlane&Pilot
It’s also no chore to control the instruments,
though Garmin had to get creative to make
that happen, using a combination of knobs and
touchscreen gestures to allow pilots to quickly
and accurately work with the display. To go from
page to page, you just use the outer concentric
ring, and to make selections and enter values,
you use the inner knob. Touch control isn’t only
possible but necessary for pilots to use in order
to select the function they’re aiming to control.
This could be inputting a target altitude. Touch
the preselect field, which activates it, and then
use the inner knob to select the target altitude.
In other cases, you can use classic gestures, like
pinch to zoom and panning, which you do with
a single finger.
There are a couple of gestures that are new
to Garmin avionics, including the long touch,
analogous to a knob press, to do things like sync
to standard barometric pressure. There’s also a
new swipe gesture you can use to immediately
pull up pop-up menus, which you can also access
with a button push. Menus, by the way, are placed
on the display in a way that makes sense for that
particular instrument. None of these gestures,
of course, are Garmin inventions. If you use
a smartphone or any one of a hundred other
modern electronic devices, navigating around
the GI 275 will likely be second nature.
That’s an important point, because before
long there will be a lot of GI 275s in the fleet, and
this is not entirely because they’re cool, though
they definitely are, but also because it will be
more cost-effective in many cases for owners to
replace aging instruments with a GI 275 than it
would be for them to fix the legacy gauge.
When the panel welcomes a new instrument,
pilots get all kinds of safety benefits, including
saying buh-bye to failure-prone vacuum-powered
instruments (and perhaps the vacuum system
itself—how cool would that be?). This is in addi-
tion to greater reliability, capability—look again
at that primary display with synthetic vision—
and usability.
Cost of the GI 275 will vary depending on
what role it fills. A basic (but still very capable)
CDI or MFD display sells for just $3,195. Other
displays, all of which have additional hardware,
sell for just a few or several hundreds of dollars
more. A primary display (or a paired reversionary
mate) has built-in AHRS and air data and goes for
either $3,995 or $4,995, depending on whether it
also supports an autopilot. Right now, the GI 275
works with the Garmin GFC 600 and numerous
third-party models, as well, and Garmin is work-
ing on a solution that will make it compatiblewith its popular GFC 500, which right now only
pairs with the G5 flight instrument. The inclusion
in the GI 275 of an analog-to-digital converter,
needed by many legacy autopilots that rely on
old data formats, will sweeten the deal, as legacy
converters can be hard to find and expensive to
repair or replace.
So this is happening, and you can expect to
see the GI 275 in a plane near you, and soon.
Garmin has been shipping the units for more than
a month as of this writing, and they’re selling, no
surprise, very briskly. And, as I mentioned, the
market is huge. According to Garmin, its AML
list includes more than 1,000 general aviation
and business aircraft, from light singles from
Cessna and Piper up to pressurized twins, like
the Mitsubishi MU-2. How many GI 275s will
Garmin sell over the next few years? I will only
venture to say that it will be a really big number.
Why? Well, in the original release of the GI
275, Garmin’s VP of aviation sales and market-
ing, Carl Wolf, might have said it all: “If it’s round
and in their panels, pilots can likely replace it
with the GI 275 to receive modern flight display
features and benefits in a powerful yet compact
touchscreen flight instrument.”
And the addition of such instruments will go
a long way toward modernizing existing aircraft
and breathing new life into an aging fleet, which
at this point desperately needs just such an addi-
tion of smart, affordable technology to go with a
fleet full of airframes and engines that will, for
the foreseeable future, keep on keeping on. PPThe GI 275 does double, triple or quadruple duty, serving the roles of
multiple analog instruments, showing here moving map, directional
gyro, CDI and glide path indications, among others.