My concern is that the "multifunctional" radio/nav equipment switchery in some modern aircraft is so complicated that it can be counterintuitive; to the extent that a self indinduced failure is by no means out of the question. However, when I changed aircraft types with unfamiliar nav. kit, in the absence of someone to teach me first hand, I downloaded the manuals and read them, then sat in the aircraft with an external power supply plugged in. I didn't give up until I was happy with the equipment. Surely this is what we should all be prepared to do, or stay on the ground until competent?
Couldn't agree more.
OTOH it is a bit hard to legislate for a "complex avionics type rating" and IMHO there should not be one, because ultimately the regulator has no business legislating to cover every possible kind of stupidity. There will always be people happy to go up in a plane whose equipment they don't understand, and since one can fly it on a PPL, yet the only way to deal with this would be a mandatory ground school, yet there is no mandatory ground school for
anything in the PPL, it just has to be left to the pilot to realise he needs to clue himself up.
When I did the IR in the USA, I deliberately chose a school which did not have GPS equipped planes, because the stuff I have (KLN94/KMD550) is very different from the Garmin x30 kit which most schools had, and I didn't want to spend 2-3 days learning how to operate the kit to fly GPS approaches, with the missed approach nooks and crannies, only to come back to Europe where this stuff is practically irrelevant.