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| With a G1000, it's a case of the Garmin dealer saying "well, come up to see us and we will have a look at it" |
This is very true. You wouldn’t want a Garmin in a third world country.
However, remember it is modular. Switching out components its straight forward. I gather the system is proving reasonably reliable, the more so for aircraft not exposed to being kept outside! However it is early days yet.
I suspect Garmin will permit the main avionics components to be swapped out by any avionics engineer in time - which makes a great deal of sense. However, Garmin will control the market for compatible avionics.
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| How many pilots use these [backup] instruments as their primary instruments when wanting to know quickly what the speed/altitude and speed/altitude changes are? |
Never look at these at all now, looked at them often in the first few hours. Tapes are just different, I don’t think they are better or worse. If you are accustom to anything it takes time to adapt. Most of us have spent 100s of hours flying on clock face instruments so it is not surprising the transition isnt seamless. Dials do have advantages although not with the trend indicators that come with tapes. That is why on Avidyne glass the engine instruments are represented as dials.
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| I reckon it is a 1-2 day ground school to understand the main parts of it, up to loading a route into it. |
Probably about right although I don’t think there are many that teach the system well. I developed for myself a few very simple flow diagrams. With these it is relatively easy in the early days to tap into all the functions. More to the point I found if the system has a draw back it is the times you are half way through a procedure and cant get back out of that procedure. That’s easy to overcome with the diagrams.