Matt Whiting wrote:

I'm still not a fan of the King 89B. I flew with a Garmin when I had my
Skylane and, at least for me, the Garmin was much easier to learn and
fly. The King with its cumbersome knobs for page and option selection
simply isn't intuitive. I much prefer arrows for menu selection as it
more closely mimics a keyboard. Whoever dreamed up using a rotary knob
for cursor movement should be banished from avionics design!

I'm sure I'll like the 89B more as I gain familiarity, but the interface
just doesn't seem natural as compared to the Garmin which operates much
more like a PC or PDA. Even my instructor, who has flown this airplane
for many years with the 89B, still doesn't have it all figured out and
occasionally turns the know the wrong way or can't find the page he
wants at first. I can see why Garmin became so popular, so fast.

FWIW, I first learned on the 89B (and later the 94, I think). I now fly
club airplanes that are all 430ed. I find the BK more intuitive. I
suspect that "intuitive" in this case really means "most like that on which
I learned".

After all, it's not as if we've evolved for GPS use grin.

On the BK, for example, I never turn the knob the wrong way. I often do
with the Garmin; it just seems backwards to me for some reason.

However, I do need to add a caveat: I've been using computers and graphical
interfaces since well before MSFT entered the market. To me, "PC
interfaces" (ie. the MSFT window manager) seem terribly counterintuitive.
The modal Apple interface is, to me, no better. But the same reasoning
("not what I first learned") applies here.

One win the Garmin has for me over the BK (there are a few, but this is the
largest) is that the Garmin is more easily read. If I were starting from
scratch, that could very possibly put me in the Garmin buyer's camp.

- Andrew