Suddenly we’re feeling our age. Can it really be 21 years since the first Garmin integrated flight deck—the G1000—was announced for use in the Cessna Mustang? Amazingly, it has been that long that pilots have been able to fly a general aviation aircraft containing a large collection of computers that were able to talk to each other, present virtually everything the pilot needed to know about the airplane and its flight—weather, navigation, engine health, system operations, pitch, bank, airspeed, altitude—on an understandable collection of screens on the panel.
On top of that, the panel was integrated with an autopilot that could be programmed to follow a three-dimensional route displayed on those screens.
Technology
When we first flew behind an integrated flight deck, the raw ability of the technology was stunning. We couldn’t help but think about the third of legendary science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Yet thousands of pilots learned and flew the G1000. Of course, with familiarity, pilots, being human, wanted more. They wanted Garmin-style integrated flight decks on more turbine flying machines.
Garmin has rarely been accused of not being attuned to the market. Accordingly, at NBAA in 2009, it introduced the G3000 integrated flight deck for Part 23 turbine aircraft. It came out as a three-screen suite (two PFDs and one MFD, with full reversionary backup). Users spoke of its big airplane feel with the three landscape screens measuring 14.1 inches diagonally—considerably larger than the G1000 suite—and screen resolution at 1280 by 800 pixels appreciably better than the G1000.
The big improvement was in the user interface. Two icon-driven GTC 570 touchscreen controllers served as primary flight management systems and handled nearly all pilot inputs to the system.
Moving up into the G3000 was no small event, even for pilots used to flying the G1000. The G3000 manual is more than 600 pages long, so training and patience were required, although we appreciate the consistency of what might be called Garmin logic throughout the integrated flight deck line. Accordingly, we’ve watched pilots experienced with the G3000 make the system sing.
Garmin has certainly done something right, otherwise there wouldn’t be some 30,000 of their integrated flight decks in the field.
The News
In September of this year, we were invited to Garmin’s vast Olathe, Kansas, campus (530,000 sq. ft. of systems engineering space and 750,000 sq. ft. of manufacturing) to introduce us to what it described as one of the most significant developments in avionics—the third-generation integrated flight deck, G3000 PRIME. It is designed for Part 23 turbine aircraft, defense and advanced air mobility.
After one of the most intensive days we’ve spent learning a new product—briefings, flying G3000 PRIME in a simulator and in a Citation CJ-2—our takeaway was overwhelmingly positive. It appears to us that not only has Garmin integrated a sophisticated collection of applications and capabilities into the new flight deck, the user interface has been simplified and streamlined, the quality of the displays—already good—has been improved and operational speed and connectivity have been increased by an order of magnitude.
TSO
We were advised that Garmin has received a Technical Standard Order (TSO) from the FAA for G3000 PRIME. That’s a big deal in the avionics world—analogous to an aircraft manufacturer completing the complicated process of certification of an aircraft for production. It is authorization from the FAA approving the design and production of the system. From our observations over the years, obtaining a TSO is not even close to an easy task.
Garmin accomplished a great deal in obtaining a TSO, but that is only part of the story of getting it to potential users. A TSO is not approval to install G3000 PRIME in any aircraft—it is step one in a two-step process. It is approval to Garmin to manufacture and sell it to original equipment manufacturers (OEM)—aircraft manufacturers—who then obtain approval to install it in their aircraft.
In our experience, the TSO process separates vaporware from the real thing when it comes to avionics in production aircraft.
As to potential users, we were told by Garmin that several OEMs in the Part 23 turbine world are going to be offering G3000 PRIME in their aircraft and deliveries will be taking place in 2025. As this was about to go to press the first OEM announced that it has already decided that it likes G3000 PRIME: Textron is installing it on its new Citation CJ4 Gen 3 edition and deliveries will start in early 2025.
The Basics
The G3000 PRIME primary displays are three-14-inch edge-to-edge touchscreens that are sunlight readable and fingerprint resistant. What Garmin now calls secondary displays (previously they were referred to as touchscreen controllers) are seven-inch touchscreens that contain 40 percent more display area because of their edge-to-edge design. They do not have knobs or buttons on them and, depending on OEM preference, can be installed as portrait or landscape presentations.
What we have thought of as PFDs previously are now primary flight windows (PFW) on G3000 PRIME and the MFD is the multifunction window (MFW). During our demonstration we saw a PFW displaying information we normally consider to be on a PFD, but also splitting the screen to be both a PFW and MFW.
Split Screen
PFWs and MFWs have full- and split-screen options and quick access bars to allow rapid access to common apps such as charts, weather, traffic and maps with one touch. When using the map app, touching a desired spot opens what is called a radial menu that then lets the pilot obtain additional information on airports, weather and airspace or adjust a flight plan via graphical editing. A major part of the design of G3000 PRIME was an intention to make access to information shallower, to reduce the number of actions a pilot has to perform to get to the desired material on the screen for information or to make changes to previous pilot inputs such as flight plans or approach selection.
Garmin personnel repeatedly remarked that G3000 PRIME was designed to support the pilot(s) by reducing overall workload, simplifying access to relevant information and making it easy to make changes needed when a flight gets demanding in complex airspace, high-density terminal operations or lousy weather.
Overall, the system has twice the CPU processing power of G3000, four times more memory, a higher refresh rate and a gigabit of system connectivity, making the system—according to Garmin—up to 100 times faster. As we used PRIME, the new capabilities demonstrated themselves in the ability to get more information faster and see it displayed more rapidly due to faster refresh rates and the sharpest, clearest displays we can recall seeing.
Multi-touch
In addition, with what Garmin describes as multi-touch technology, each display can accept up to ten simultaneous inputs—that is, both pilots can be using the touchscreen on the same display window to make inputs, making the system far faster and even more valuable in high-workload situations in two-pilot operations.
One of the big advantages of G3000 PRIME is its flexibility; it can be customized dramatically—one area is with the SDUs which are large enough to be configured to double as a standby flight instrument display and get rid of the need for a standby flight instrument on the panel.
A Window Manager feature is a part of each SDU—either one can configure app displays, window sizing and generally set up the PFWs and MFW for each phase of flight.
See a video of the G3000 PRIME on the Aviation Consumer YouTube channel.
Emergency Return Feature: Real-world Assistance
We are big fans of Garmin’s Emergency Autoland system and covered it in depth when it was first offered, giving it a rave review. The technology involved in a system automatically flying the airplane to a safe landing after crew incapacitation, while communicating with ATC and keeping passengers advised is, to us, approaching revolutionary. It got the aviation world’s attention in a big way, resulting in, among other things, Garmin being awarded the Robert J. Collier Trophy in 2020.
The Collier isn’t given away for simply showing up at a fly-in and not wrecking the airplane on landing. It is awarded “for the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America, with respect to improving the performance, efficiency, and safety of air or space vehicles, the value of which has been thoroughly demonstrated by actual use during the preceding year.”
With G3000 PRIME, Garmin has the potential to collaborate with OEMs to bring Emergency Autoland to a large cross section of the Part 25 turbine fleet. Plus, with PRIME, Garmin updated Autoland so that it now searches NOTAMs to prevent the system attempting to land on a closed airport or runway.
When it comes to the real world, we hope Emergency Autoland sells far more airplanes than it saves lives. While that sounds cynical, we think the more important getting-the-airplane-on-the-ground-safely feature of G3000 PRIME in day-to-day operation of owner-flown, single-pilot and two-crew turbine machines is Emergency Return.
That’s because there just aren’t that many pilot/crew incapacitation accidents each year. We can argue the value of FAA medicals until well after the beer runs out, but there just aren’t a plethora of accidents in which the passengers in an airplane die because the pilot became incapacitated. To us, the more real-world challenge for a single-pilot—or two-crew—flight deck is getting the airplane safely back on the ground when things go south in the first several minutes after takeoff.
That’s when the human(s) at the pointy end of the airplane are faced with figuring out what is wrong, whether it can be fixed, fixing it if possible, communicating with ATC, not running into anything, keeping the airplane right side up via hand flying or with the autopilot and finding the way to a suitable runway, landing on it and getting stopped. Even though we set up and brief emergency return before taking off, the two times we’ve had to do it (due to engine issues) we were very glad it was VFR because we were busier than whatever expletive you prefer.
With Garmin’s Emergency Return feature in G3000 PRIME your normal pretakeoff checklist item of preparing for an emergency return now involves just telling the system what airport and approach you want to use. The system then has everything you are going to need on standby.
As we briefed Emergency Return in the Garmin simulator, Jason Hewes, Team Leader Human Factors Design Engineer, who was patiently guiding us through the system, emphasized that G3000 PRIME was developed to provide assistance to the pilot, not take her or him out of the system. He said that the idea was to free up the pilot to make informed decisions in high-pressure situations so that the pilot can use maximum mental bandwidth, so to speak, to deal with the stuff that is important. To keep the pilot from being diverted from that by time-consuming drudge work such as pulling up approach plates or finding nav and com frequencies.
The design focus on freeing up the pilot to be a pilot was repeated by Jessica Koss, Team Leader Corporate Flight Department, when we flew with her in Garmin’s Citation CJ2 and briefed the systems, including Emergency Return.
In the sim, we launched on a planned flight and Hewes gave us an engine issue that required an immediate return. We pushed the Activate Emergency Return touch point on the SDU (that’s it to the left) and instantly we had everything we needed for the instrument approach to the airport and runway we desired. It was only a matter of flying ATC’s vectors to the final approach course, shooting the approach and landing. All of the needed frequencies were presented, the nav radio was set up (it was an ILS approach) and we could concentrate on flying and dealing with the engine problem at a manageable workload level.
Looking back on the experience, we think Emergency Autoland will sell a lot of airplanes and eventually save some lives. However, we think Emergency Return is the feature of G3000 PRIME that is going to be used with some regularity in real-world flying and has the potential to save a lot of lives when things get ugly for pilots shortly after takeoff, especially in weather.
