Avanti

I look around for airplanes now and again and I keep coming across the Piaggio Avanti. It is not a jet, but it is as fast as some. It is expensive ($5 million, give or take), but that goes without saying. I came across one guy's story about it and I thought his description of the instrumentation system was enlightening. Just to get warmed up he spends a couple of paragraphs cataloging all the things he doesn't like about the instrument panel. (Bunch of acronyms in here. You only need to know what a few of them mean to get the gist of this story. Everyone knows what GPS means, right? VFR & IFR stand for Visual Flight Rating and Instrument Flight Rating respectively. You might call VFR pilots amateurs and IFR pilots professionals. ATC is Air Traffic Control. Those are the guys who direct the commercial airliners. You're playing with the big boys now. Just for grins I looked up the rest of the abreviations and listed them at the end.) Then he gives us this:

Picture from 2012, Complaints from 2010

So why do we have such a terrible interface? Why the lack of moving map? Lack of good GPS-controlled autopilot for full approaches? Lack of XM-weather? teeny-tiny traffic display that you can hardly even see from the pilot's side? Panel covered with warning lights that will almost never activate and radios that include DME or ADF that are almost never used? The answer lies in the way the plane is OPERATED. Every Avanti in the world is operated IFR, every moment of flight, under air traffic control and supervision for every moment, flying airways as cleared by ATC.
Moving map? Who needs it? ATC guides us or puts us on an airway, and we follow it with a simple CDI.
Traffic avoidance? Who needs it? ATC gives traffic alerts and keeps us clear.
XM-Weather? Who needs it? We fly IFR so we do not care if it is foggy or raining, and ATC guides us around the bad storms.
Much of the situational awareness that I want in my G-1000 so that I can fly VFR, safely, alone, any place I like, becomes much less needed in the Avanti because every flight is pre-planned and then flown IFR with constant ATC supervision. This makes the old panel adequate for the needs of the airplane, even though a new G-1000 would provide much, much greater situational awareness and flexibility.

Anyway, one of the reasons this plane costs so much is it uses turboprop engines. Airplane designers love turboprops. I don't for the simple reason that they cost too much. All I have to do is wait until somebody runs their turbines out of time and decides they don't want to spend $4 million for new engines and I can pick up the plane for a song, bolt a couple of alumimum V-8's on it and I'll be flying high.

ADF - Automatic Direction Finder

ATC - Air Traffic Control

CDI - Course Deviation Indicator

DME - Distance Measuring Equipment

IFR - Instrument Flight Rating

G-1000 - Garmin's Answer to Avionics Complexity

GPS - Global Positioning System

VFR - Visual Flight Rating
XM - Satellite Weather Radio