Dynon SkyView in a Skyhawk

[Applause] Larry Anglo sono reporting for aviation consumer magazine from a cold Auburn Maine the Cessna 172 behind me is about three-quarters of a way through a dye non-certified glass panel upgrade now what's interesting about the Sky View installation in a certified airplane like a 172 is that dye not has open the installation to a and P mechanics with ia credentials that's exactly what this aircraft is doing here at skyward aviation now before we go fly this airplane with the new dine on system let's talk to Tom Ward to find out about the installation and what it's taken to get this job done this airplane here is an older aircraft as a 172 n it had all the old steam gauges in it we upgraded everything including the circuit breakers the switches we removed all the old wiring that was in there which had had bundles and bundles of fuses inside there so we've removed all of that equipment we've gone through everything made sure that the circuit breakers are the right sizes we did overlays on all those pieces as well and for me as an A&P I a starting with something like this I've I've already done a lot of installations on for engine monitoring systems and that same thing applies to this and it's pretty much straightforward the biggest thing I found was the learning curve is you're really dealing with a lot of smaller wires that I've never had to really deal with before and there's a learning curve there but I'd say for most it's not going to be that difficult to really get into that and and just go through it step by step is what I tried to do and making this a complete glass cockpit type of thing which really I mean a new 172 is what 350,000 versus this that's you know you're probably talking closer to 45 or 50 thousand for our complete installation with a Garmin 650 or have dinah whatever you choose for a secondary comm this dine on installation is complete it's a little bit warmer because this airplanes bent down for a good amount of time to get the retrofit done i'm here with jeff van West and before we talk about the dine on system in general let's go down to the ground and talk to Jeff a little bit about what influence a flying clubs decision to go at this dine on sweet now we'll come back up here at the cockpit and look at a few things that stand out with this dine on sweet hi I'm Jeff Van Weston I've done a bunch of these videos from the other side of the camera but today I'm here because I'm a member of the bald eagle Flying Club of Portland Maine been in continuous operation since 1956 and this is one of our airplanes it is finally flying again in mid-april with a new dine on Sky View install this has been a long and somewhat arduous process but not just because of the dine on itself we bought this airplane when it was a great airplane at the time we got it with a hundred and 80 horsepower upgrade a power flow exhaust has a stole kit on it we redid the interior and we take the airplanes all over the place this airplane actually be going to Canada on Saturday we take it into the backcountry so the airplane it was a great airplane is valuable to us as a club as well and it flies beautifully engines running well all that good stuff it came with a fantastic panel that was like cutting edge of 1999 with an old MX 20 M FD and approach certified GPS it had an S Tech 50 autopilot with altitude hold and we were nursing it along trying to decide what to do we decided we're gonna put in two garmin g500 tanana GTN gps we'll figure out how to interface that with our autopilot and we got the money together the club got buy-in it was 2017 just before Oshkosh and we said you know let's wait and make sure nothing new and great comes out at Oshkosh and at Oshkosh that year Dinan announced their certified install for 172s of which ours was one and suddenly for now for maybe $10,000 more we could add a two-axis autopilot engine monitoring have a full glass panel with glass backup get rid of all of our legacy gauges and we put it to the club and they said yeah so we came up with even more money and then had to wait for the SCC to come through it finally did then it was flying season again for us because we're in Maine we didn't want to take the plane down during the summer so that gets us to last fall when we had scheduled a block of time about five six weeks when the plane was going to be down and then we had an incident with another airplane that took it offline we couldn't take two airplanes offline at the same time so we had to delay even further that caused even more delays and the plane was actually in and out of the shop fitting in around other stuff from about late fall until now when it's flying again but it is finally almost complete and it is a great system so the system we put in is is kind of the bare-bones it's a single screen couldn't come up with money for our two screens it's a touchscreen which is fantastic we decided to go with the GTN 650 just because we're a club of 80 members right now about 50 people actively flying and given the other options that were out there this was the simplest one to use after we pulled some people it's sort of like operating an iPhone we retained one of the radios from the previous install that was still working well and everything else came out of the airplane and when I say everything else I really do mean everything else the plane actually lost 35 pounds when we by the time we remade it at the end of this whole process so we picked up some useful load as well like I said it's a single 10 inch touchscreen it does everything so it's got the PFD the MFD the engine instruments all in one display we don't have a separate engine instrument cluster so if we lose this screen we also do lose our engine instruments would be advantage of having a two screen system it's a little bit busy but it works some rising ly well and it's phenomenally configurable you start up the airplane and it'll tell you if the there's a mismatch between how much fuel it sees by the fuel gauges versus how much fuel is in the fuel computer and allow you to adjust the two of them the system is super configurable we actually did a bunch of our own flight testing so we were the ones who went up and tuned the autopilot we were able to do the compass swing and things like that all under the watchful eye of the ia who is putting in the system but we were as a club able to be really involved in his owners and it also helped bring down the cost of the install because that was labor time that we did for fun and and he didn't have to do you know another just a thing that appealed to us as a club and made it worth investing in the airplane is we just made an airplane that looked so much nicer the royalite plastic is gone we've got this nice panel from thrust flight down in Texas we were able to you know clean up all the switches and buttons and when somebody comes to the club and you know do you want to join do you want to fly our airplanes we show them this airplane granted still needs paint job on the outside but we've shown the inside of this airplane and they're like wow that's a beautiful airplane yeah I want to join that Club and fly their planes and that's how we survive so that's pretty important the fact that we got engine instrumentation is fantastic I was really happy that we now have a carb air temperature gauge we can actually see fuel flow and actual gallons remaining from a fuel totalizer we can even see you know how efficiently the airplane is running it has the lean assists which on an O 360 like ours isn't super helpful but it would be helpful on other systems and then the other thing that I love is for the display I have the ability to do just about anything I want in terms of the whole display itself like I could put the engine instruments on one side this can be really helpful for you know doing training or working with a private student and you know really want to get into how the engine operates I can if I want go into a whole set up and get rid of the bottom band if I want put engine on excuse me engine on the side engine over there I can even go into the display actually you know go into menu excuse me PFD tools we can make a 6-pack we can get rid of the synthetic vision if we want to we can put a G meter on if we want to if it's an external antenna of those things it's like just a super super configurable airplane so one of my favorite little things is I can take a screenshot at any time in flight it's great for training it's great for debugging and at any point I can send that to a USB Drive that's how we update the databases but also I can put those files on a computer we can talk about them later so Jeff on the moving map display we've got a green ring what is that the green ring is our glide ratio or how far we can glide if you will it's wind corrected so you see we're not quite centered in it because we do have a wizard kind of light variable I guess we're moving more to the center it's but it sometimes it's really far offset and pretty much if anything is inside that ring based on the glide characteristics of this plane we could reach it it doesn't take into account terrain so there's a balance between the two points you would have to glide through it but it does give you a really good idea if there was an airport inside that you know you could reach that Airport so this airplane before the upgrade had an S Tech 50 but the die not on a pile and is far more automated it's perfectly integrated you know the Aztecs had a separate autopilot and you had to tell it whether you were on GPS steering or you weren't on GPS sharing so forth this is fully integrated you can actually go right off the screen which is really the easiest way I find you know I could change my my speed actually altitude just captured here so I can have a vertical speed by indicated airspeed vertical speed I can apply a heading I can have a hold of track obviously I can fly a kind of nav source truly to access you know I have vertical navigation and lateral navigation and I could have something in play and then something else R so I was climbing at a certain speed and I never told it to capture 3,500 and it did this autopilot doesn't have envelope protection but does have a level but there that's the the reason we keep that red switch on there to make sure the autopilot servos are all powered up because we do have a lot of VFR only pilots in the club if they were to get to a situation here and for those of you watching at home I have cleared the area before doing this they were ready to get to a situation the airplane gets into kind of an unusual attitude they can just reach over and push that level but my hands are up here now auto pilots working I'll watch for that traffic that's over there five miles out we're back and now the auto pilot saw an engine using navigation sir and I thank you very much about autopilot get myself out of trouble what's unusual about the autopilot for people who've flown auto pods with a real approach mode is it has no approach mode there's just nav and that's everything people are tracking a GPS tracking a GPS approach an ILS approach and you have to manually arm vertical now that's what actually arms your glide slope so the all of us who had flown many other auto pilots we got it to an approach and you didn't capture the glide slope but like what's going on here what I want to do it it has to be manually armed so the laundry list the airplane has ATS be in and out it has Wi-Fi two iPads for bringing that ATSB data and soon the weather as well to the iPad and the ACARS it's got a back-up display it has an AOA indicator so we can fly by angle of attack which is great if you're going into a small strip somewhere and we have the stole kit it's amazing how slow the airplane can fly it has a full to access autopilot driven by either the GTN 650 or the sky views internal GPS the sky view has a backup battery the backup has a backup battery if you were to lose all the avionics the Sky View has its own internal GPS that you can navigate by so it's got a lot of redundancy in the system and this display this HDX that's in the airplane it just it it feels a lot more robust than the earlier systems that are in our RV 12 and someday we may have an upgrade the RV 12 to be like this one the flying club's got their airplane back equipped with this fancy dine on sweet what's the takeaway how did the economics look and what advice might you have for other owners thinking about doing a transformation of this size get budgeted somewhere north of 40,000 dollars up to about 44 to fly it down to Texas and have them do it and it seems like a lot but for an airplane or a flying club that was worth it and it looks like I'd say don't quote me on this but you're kind of recording me so that is quoting but so far it looks like this is going to come in at about 38 39 so we did save a little bit of money doing it with our own ia but it's really hard to say because II I know was was somewhat generous with this time because he was learning it he wants to do more of them so and we also did a lot of the work ourselves that somebody else might not want to do because we wanted to we were interested no professional in our professional I would say if it's an ia who's never done one before you're definitely not going to save anything and maybe you're asking for some headaches if you find someone who has experience have done a few of them that could really work out in your favor and certainly this place is like thrust flight they know what they're doing and dynam was great for you know sport and we definitely needed a hit at times you know guy I needed it back on the phone with us and they're able to work everything out in the end I know like the new g3x test touched it's now an option I think this is a little cheaper and as a little more configurable the other system I haven't flown but you know the fact that it's available for so many other airplanes boy if we got an airplane that just wasn't available for I wouldn't hesitate to put one of those in but I'm pretty happy with what we have so far my other piece of advice is don't try and save little bits of money we had parts of our pitot-static system that were working fine with our old analog instruments we didn't replace them and to go back and replace them once we had more sophisticated instrument had detected leaks the other instruments could even do got the plane open replace every old hose replace every old cable don't try and save a penny cuz it's cost you many many many pounds later so go all in go all in for sure and you can read a full report on the dine on certified suite an upcoming issue of aviation consumer magazine for aviation consumer of Larry Ellison oh and thanks a lot to Jeff and Wes for helping with the field report [Music] you

Channel: AVweb

Views: 74,718

Rating: 4.9120879 out of 5

Keywords: Dynon Certified, Dynon SkyView HDX, Dynon in a Cessna, Aviation Consumer magazine

Id: Reh8-6fBQDA

Length: 16min 18sec (978 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 09 2019