Pace - I think you are disagreeing with something I didn't say
Also
It worries me somewhat with pilots who rely too much on displays and ignore their basic flying skills because one day they may need them.
I don't see a connection between modern nav systems (which basically give you accurate LNAV, and possibly VNAV) and "basic flying skills". of course you need the latter, otherwise you will plummet as soon as you slow down the Citation to 30kt on long final
maxred -
I flew it because he does not know how to work it, technology overload, and yes, he had been trained. He was basically afraid of it, and gues what, the 500k or whatever asset sits on the ground, 5 years old with a 100 hours on it
What does this tell us?
It tells us that a particular pilot could not get his head around his systems. How many people are shocked?
When I got my TB20 in 2002, I never found an instructor who knew how to drive the KLN94, or the HSI. I just flew around Kent at 4700ft while I sussed it all out
This sounds elitist, but it is a fact that loads of pilots who can get a PPL will have problems understanding complex avionics.
I know a chap, who owned a rather pricey plane (7 figures; I am not identifying him more than that) who never got his head around the avionics in that plane. Eventually he bought a rather slower and simpler 7 figure plane
He had hundreds of hours, with a "live-in" instructor.
And getting one's head around advanced avionics assumes the pilot can dig out an instructor who knows this stuff, which on the UK GA scene is a huge uphill struggle. The expertise in this department is awfully low. When I did my JAA IR ground school, very recently, I had three teachers there. 2 were long-retired ex RAF navigators. One did not have any apparent current knowledge. The other thought that a KNS80 was state of the art. How many years ago was a KNS80 discontinued??? The 3rd was an ex airliner flight engineer, retired maybe 20 years. All lovely chaps, but decades behind. As was the outrageously irrelevant IR syllabus. This is the face of the establishment training FUTURE AIRLINE PILOTS. Plus any GA pilots who need an FTO process (IR, or a CPL). Go figure....
In the USA, they have proper courses on this stuff. Over here, ther eis almost nothing. I gather TAA run some, for their Cirrus sales, and obviously they need to.
However, your assertion that the technology is wonderful, and gets everyone in the place, where the want, at the touch of a button, is NOT backed up statistically - vis a vis incursions, crashes, CFIT - the accident rate appears level, therefore this technology has not increased safety
Technology makes it far easier to execute technically challenging flights. That's a fact.
That a similar # of people fly into hills tells us very little, because we have no data on total hours flown, etc.
Also, most CFITs seems to be done by people doing "silly stuff" even though they have IRs. We have done some recent ones (N2195B, N403HP, the recent G-reg one in S. France) as far as we could have. Very few people (none I recall off hand) have recently done a CFIT where they flew proper IFR procedures.
Once you depart from proper IFR procedures (and it is
those that modern avionics assist with so much) then all bets are off, and about the only modern thing which will help you is synthetic vision
And that will stop working soon enough if you fly in the bottom of some canyon
and I was not comfortable with the full glass - ok I was not trained on it, but, we still managed with all that technology to go into a Danger Area
Well there you are. You were not trained on it. Why did you get airborne? You should have stayed on the ground until you spent some hours going through the systems. I know some people will drive off a rental car without first finding out where the indicators, lights, wipers etc are, but I wouldn't. So why do it in a plane, which is much less forgiving, unless you can engage the autopilot, which you probably can't either
Modern avionics are not complex in the sense of needing a maths degree or anything like that, but they are on the level of a full-featured piece of PC software; for example Photoshop. Somebody who can use Photoshop (fairly fully I mean) and understands principles of IFR flight (MEAs, routings, aircraft performance, etc) will be fine. But it is obvious that this rules out a fair chunk of the PPL community.
The "problem" is that anybody can buy a new G1000 aircraft and fly off in it... Like you did. There is no solution to that.