On Fri, 20 Jul 2007 08:23:23 -0700, Robert M. Gary wrote:

Could be a processor/memory resources issue, I suppose.

Its hard to tell and Garmin would never give you an honest response. When
I asked them why the G1000 doesn't have airways (shouldn't a glass cockpit
aircraft be set up to fly IFR w/o enroute charts?), they responded that it
would take an "enormous" amount of memory to store all the airways in the
U.S.

I've found that with Garmin too, and I find it surprising as well as
annoying. What would be the harm from an honest answer (ie. "it's not
cost effective" or "it would require that we spend X in recertification"
or whatever the answer needs to be)?

I wonder if we're not hearing "Garmin's" "thoughts" but the thoughts,
opinions, and even guesses of individual employees. In my case, I'd asked
on the tech support line a while back whether the WAAS upgrade to the
430/530 line (which was still mythical at the time but which was known to
require significant hardware as well as software changes) would include
the airway-based flight plan entry mechanism found on the 480. The answer
was that this was too difficult for pilots to use.

Since that's exactly how we express clearances, I was shocked at the
answer. In retrospect, it's probably not a bad guess if someone is
familiar only with VFR flying. But I'd expect the company as a whole to
know that we IFR-ers are out there too.

Though perhaps there aren't enough of us using Garmins to make it cost
effective for them to add this. Or perhaps we already buy Garmins, so
there's no additional need for this feature from Garmin's perspective. I
don't like either answer, of course, but at least it would make sense.

- Andrew