NW_Pilot's Trans-Atlantic Flight -- All the scary details...
A more experienced pilot who had studied the aux tank system may have
been able to mentally diagnose the cause of the fuel venting. But
Garmin's role in this incident is unforgivable.
Garmin needs to wake up! To have out-of-bounds sensor inputs reboot the
system continuously, especially something as unreliable as fuel sensors, is
horrible system design.
Even Microsoft has awakened to this. They now have fewer browser bugs per
year than Firefox.
What do you want to bet that there is a bunch of other safety critical,
software driven devices that are prone to this?
Think about this for a second. What if there was some unexpected
transmission from a GPS satellite due to an incorrect software load to the
satellite that caused the G1000 to reboot continuously. Now extend that.
Take your Garmin portable GPS out to save your butt and it ALSO includes the
deficient algorithm and continuously reboots. Scary. I would bet the
portables share quite a bit of logic and decision trees with the panel
mounts.
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