DA40 with a Glass Cockpit

After flying the 2 seater DA20s for a while, the natural progression is transition to the Diamond Star DA40. At first glance, one will notice that the power plant is bigger and this aircraft has four seats (although the useful load is about 900 lbs, which can make it difficult to carry four adults with all of their luggage).



Then a closer inspection will reveal that there are two separate fuel tanks located in the wings. Then looking in the cockpit once will notice a blue level between the throttle and the fuel mixture valve. This blue knob controls the variable pitch propeller which is a type of propeller with blades that can be rotated around their long axis to change their pitch to take better advantage of the power supplied by an engine in much the same way that a transmission in a car takes better advantage of its power source. The mechanism varies depending on the aircraft, but the effect is to change the angle of attack of the propeller blades to take a smaller or larger "bite" of air as it rotates.  As a general rule, the pilot should avoid high manifold pressure with low r.p.m. setting.  This offers a huge advantage over the traditional fixed-pitched propeller, but it is one more item in the cockpit the pilot needs to monitor.

While most of the DA40s will have these features, I opted to learn on the 2009 Diamond Star DA-40 XLS (N385DS). The most obvious difference is the Garmin G1000. All of the traditional instruments (almost all) have been replaced by two computer screens.



This technology is fantastic. Not only will it show the best route, but it will give you tons of information like when you are flying to close to terrain, when other aircraft are nearby, or even weather reports. This plane can even fly itself as it is equipped with an autopilot (note the red button on the stick is the autopilot cancel button). With a setup like this, they call it a “glass cockpit”, since the pilot is looking at a glass screen rather than traditional steam gauges.


In addition to the items I mentioned above, there are dozens of additional features that this aircraft has. While these can all be very helpful to the pilot, it was extremely overwhelming getting in the cockpit for the first time. The pilot needs to make multiple quick decisions based upon the information available. This is not a lot of time to flip through screens to find the altitude or what radio frequency I’m not.


The actually operation of the aircraft is very similar to the DA20, just land 10 kts faster, that’s about it (maybe a few other things). The focus of the transition is the operations of the instruments. I am told it expect 5 additional hours of training specific to this aircraft prior to being allowed to solo.


Today was a beautiful sunny day, and CFI Bruce Cherven was kind enough to fly with me and show me how everything worked. We took off of runway 19 and headed towards Shelbyville Municipal Airport (SYI), which is about 27 nm from Smyrna, plus it offered a VOR for navigation.


We practiced a couple of landings, which were not my best, and headed back home. It was getting dark at this point so I logged my first night hour (0.5 hours actually). If I thought airports were hard to spot during the day, it is even more difficult to find them at night. Luckily they have the lights directing towards the runway.


This was a great experience, but all in all I didn’t feel comfortable during this flight. Everything was so new to me that I felt like it was my first time flying.  I was just as overwhelmed as I was on my first flight.

Flight Time: 1.2 hours
Cost: Plane rental - $178.80, Instructor Fee - $68.00