You're the bloke in the pub I walk away from.
I'll save you the trouble: I almost never go to pubs
Not having to do that is one of the luxuries of having a girlfriend. Not to mention one of the luxuries of the lifestyle choices which comes with middle age
A good point but transitioning from gpss to heading is easy; press the heading button on the g1000 and heading on the ap assuming not gfc700 equipted and you are in heading mode with bug steer available at the twist of a knob.
Indeed, but if he really had just 2 hrs conversion training for the SR22, it isn't terribly likely that he was all that familiar with the G1000 buttons.
Sadly, while "anybody" can get a PPL in a C152, there is a certain % of PPL holders who will never get their heads around the more advanced avionics. This may sound offensive to some but so be it. I take myself back to 2002 when I bought the TB20 with, hey, wait for it, an HSI, and could not find a single instructor who knew how it worked. I downloaded a load of manuals off the internet and went up to 5000ft over Kent, put the AP on, and gradually worked out what it did. A G1000 has another level of functionality. No extra capability as such (unless you count LPV which doesn't yet exist in Europe) but a whole lot more buttons and menus and submenus.
To operate an autopilot correctly, or even usefully, you need to understand where it gets its inputs from and what exactly it does in which mode. The GFC700 (at least in the TBM850 G1000 installation in which I have flown with it) has always-on GPSS so you enter a WP and press DCT and the CP auto-slews and the plane will go to the WP regardless of which way you are pointing, which is a lot simpler than more traditional AP installations where the CP interaction is required. But in this case, as suggested above, he may have wanted to go to a HDG mode and may have messed up.
Another possibility is that he stalled when he levelled off. If you do a descent at say -1000fpm (can anybody work out the ROD in that final long track?) your MP may well be too low for level flight when you finally level off. I tend to avoid descents below 18" MP for this reason if descending on AP.
Back to the G1000, there is a lot of functionality and it should have a mandatory classroom, which you
can fail. But this has no support in the ICAO pilot paperwork structure, would play havoc with already painfully slow GA modernisation because many pilots would avoid doing business with a school which has decided to modernise, and we should never wish for extra regulation in this already grotesquely over-regulated game.
As an aside, this accident report does clear up one of the issues that was hotly debated in 2008 - Do the French consider themselves to be part of the Country EASA/JAA? And of course they do not and have affirmed their understanding of 61.3.
That one was cleared up earlier by the State of Registry (FAA chief counsel office) rulings which somebody found on the FAA website last year.
To me, there was never any doubt that a PPL
issued in the UK was not
issued in France
I wonder if the French writer actually knew about the FAA ruling. I bet he didn't (very few people do) but his opinion happens to be right.