The Powerful Garmin 496

For the last few weeks I have had the privilege of flying with a powerful tool that greatly enhances my safety of flight. Its the only piece of "glass cockpit" that I have available to me and I love it. I just wish I had one of my own. Sadly I'll be returning it to my Dad next week because it is his. I've just been using it for a few weeks while he's been on vacation and not flying a lot.

The Garmin 496 is the coolest thing since sliced bread! It has so many useful features that I don't even know where to begin. It is far superior to anything we have on board our aircraft in terms of situational awareness. In the following pictures I'll describe how the Garmin helps.



Above you'll see a picture of a nasty line of thunderstorms that were heading towards our original destination of Memphis. The Garmin was the only picture of the radar we had available to us prior to departure due to the fact we were picking up our cargo on a cargo ramp and there were no weather computers that we could use to check weather. Our only weather we get is in text form that comes out with our flight plan. The TAF for MEM was ugly, calling for heavy rain and thunderstorms at the time of our arrival. As usual, our dispatcher gave us no heads up about the weather and tried to rush us to get airborne. He could have cared less about trying to send us to an airport that was about to get slammed with brutal thunderstorms. All he wanted was for us to get in the air and figure things out later. Thankfully I had the Garmin handy so the captain and I could take a good look at the Nexrad radar. The really cool feature of the GPS is the ability to overlay the radar with your flight route. This way you can see exactly where the storms are in relation to our flight path.

So instead of going to MEM, we changed our destination to LIT because the storms had already passed and there was no ground stop holding us back. Enroute we were flying at FL410 and could see several hundred mile ahead of us. Looking ahead we could use our eyes to see the part of the storms that were higher than us. Usually any time a storm is above our flight level, we try and steer well clear because they tend to be the hail and tornado producing type of storms. During the day its pretty easy to steer clear, but at night, its not so easy to pick out where exactly the cells are sitting. The Garmin will let out know exactly where they are.



Below you will see our radar. As you can see its painting a target off to our left. If you scroll between pictures, they are all from around the same time period. You can see what we are seeing out the windshield, on the Garmin and on our radar. I'll take the 496 over the other two.



And finally a picture of our all powerful, all knowing, super advanced, state of the art for 1989, Trimble 2000. As you can see, its a very, very basic GPS that does not off much in terms of situational awareness. In fact it is more of a hindrance than a help because they are never in the same place in any of our aircraft. Since they are our primary source of navigation, you are constantly scanning the entire cockpit to get your heading from the GPS. With the Garmin, I can plop it right in front on me on the glareshield and it drastically cuts down on how much time is spend looking all over the cockpit.





I've only scratched the surface of what this thing can do. I'll have more posts about some of the other features later. I'll sure be sad to give it back, but I'm glad to have had it while I did.