[Bob]

As the resident curmudgeon I will predict the pretty little displays on the Garmin or its competitor’s offerings will do to drivers what it has done to pilots. John among others is a real pilot whereas I am an ersatz pilot albeit one capable of maintaining spacial awareness and hand flying capability in the worst of weather. I watched a genration of pilots going from taildragger drivers who knew how to use the stick and rudders to systems managers that needed to have the pretty displays soi they could keep the plane icon on the magenta line. Without the pictoral display they were lost.

So now we have cars that park themselves, cars that tell the idiot behing the wheel when he is drifting out of his lane and adaptive braking because the driver otherwise occupied with talking or texting doesnb’t know he is tailgating.

Add to this entire equation engine data which to the average soccer mom doesn’t mean diddly and we now have systems capable of diverting the attention of anyone who chooses to get behind the wheel of these rolling game systems.

[Ray]

Jon,

I agree with the premise that too much information is probably worse than not enough. Soccer Mom’s getting reports on transmission temperatures, light bulb failures, proximity to service intervals and the like serve little use.

I recall going through the factory school as initial cadre (first guys at the airline to fly this new beast) on the MD-11. All of our steam gauges had been replaced by 6 CRT’s (television sets) and a thing called an MCDU (miscellaneous control display unit), assorted other electronic gadgetry plus they stole our flight engineer, whose charge was to watch “stuff”. The system provided the latest in navigation (laser ring gyro’s that were similar to INS but had no moving parts, at least that could be seen or heard), all traditional flight instruments plus the moving map displays, and much more. The system would not only, should you ask it, provide brake temperatures, tire pressures, hydraulic temperatures, pressures and quantity but would also monitor everything that went on in the bowels of the machine. Now here is where Honeywell really shined…all of this monitoring was tied to a central fault display system and various cues would be presented in order of severity. From level 0 to level 3. Level 0 was information, if you wanted it…like aft lav holding tank approaching capacity while level 3 would blurt out an emergency tri-tone and turn on a number of red lights plus, in a female voice (supposed to keep everyone more calm), may announce Engine Fire Number 1!. What’s more all of these alerts were inhibited during critical phases of flight, like take off and landing….pretty smart system. One thing that has to be remembered here, this was all on an airplane. Now, with all of that said, the important thing to remember is that, even with all this high level of sophistication at least half of all warning we ever received were false alarms, sensor errors! Additionally these systems were under constant supervision by not only Honeywell but also our own maintenance departments; they were tuned, updated and tweaked all of the time.

Now these systems are making there way to rolling stock . When your granparents were in their buggy behind the horse they new they were lugging the animal if it was covered with froth and broke wind, the simplist of monitoring systems. Then came gasoline and steam which in the early years were monitored by the presence of flames, explosions or other strange noises……… By the 50’s we had 6V fuel gauges (remember the car that was out of gas at the 1/4 full mark?) and analog oil pressure gauges that were accurate within 50%, cable driven speedo’s and if you were a hot rodder a cable driven Sun Tachometer mounted on your steering column. Did any of these things cause worry, Nope! Now we can monitor axle grease temperature…silly, yes. Too much information available and a good percentage of what is available may be incorrect! Considering that the last maintenance these units will likely ever see is at installation, it becomes almost laughable.

Now back to the K2, I didn’t see any of that above although it would be my guess that it will be available. What I did see was a system that would pretty much do it all, as mentioned the most impressive was the navigation. I can do without the e mail and texting but many of the other features were certainly, for want of a better word, user friendly. Garmin, in general aviation airplanes, takes care of its customers and products, of course that service is not free. It would be my hope to see installations like these as stand alone devices that report, monitor, navigate, adjust electric blinds according to a laundry list selected by the user.

[Archived]

I like the Garmin for aviation. What I did not like (and did not have) was when everything was being integrated into a single system and the system was turning pilots into paperweights.

In the Cirrus when the pilot lost control he was instructed to turn on the autopilot or pull the red parachute handle. He was morphing into a passenger.

It is happening with cars. Used to be a driver was engaged because he not only had to maintain speed himself he had to shift gears, modulate the brakes to avoid lockup, press the button on the floor to dim the headlights and his sole means of diverting his attention was the AM radio.

Today skills are being replaced with automatic systems. Unless I disable the stability control in my car I cannot even spin the tires. I don’t have to worry about locking the brakes because the car takes care of that. The cell phone can be a part of the radio system and there is no end to the magic you can do with the dash display. My point is while cars are better and safer now than they ever have been I think it has cost the driving public driving skills. If you ever want the ultimate in hijack prevention in a car, drive a manual transmission car. Most of todays new drivers have never seen a car with a manual transmission.

I cannot get the crash on the ILS going into Buffalo a few years back out of my mind. Both pilots were unskilled in the basics and their lack of piloting skills cost 51 people their lives. They were of the generation where their needed skills a decade or two previous were replaced with cockpit automation, and I see the same thing happening to drivers who are becoming systems managers as well. And not very good ones at that.