Stjohn's RV-7

One of my favorite lines from The Road Warrior, or Mad Max 2, as everybody but us yankees calls it. To paraphrase a little green guy with a mean spin kick, “always in motion, is the panel.” When I started this adventure, I knew I wanted glass instead of steam. I’m a visual effects dork, I grew up on MFD’s and synthetic vision in movies, like the display in Snake’s glider in Escape from New York, or in the dropship in ‘Aliens,’ both of which were done by painting the edges of foam core terrain slices with fluorescent paint and filming them under blacklight to make them look like computer images. There’s also the HITS in Bladerunner, which is pretty much the only way I’d trust the average Angeleno driver in my airspace, even in 2019. That’s only 10 years from now, by the way. Fast forward to present and there’s a tall stack of options to choose from; BMA, Dynon, MGL, Grand Rapids, Tru-Trak, the list is long and distinguished. At first I was all about the EFIS-One from Blue Mountain Avionics. It was my first synVis option.. The Dynon was a good replacement for the steam gauges, but the BMA had some eye-popping features and seemed like a better option to me. At least it seemed like a better option to the ‘me’ in the alternate universe where I have unlimited amounts of money. 14k, ouch. The Grand Rapids stuff is cool, but also expensive, and the screen’s not big enough. If this is going to be my main info feed for flight ops, I don’t want to squint at it. So along comes MGL. The Enigma was intriguing, but it wasn’t big enough, and I was about to blow it off entirely, except for the price point, which is great for what the unit does. Then MGL came out with their Odyssey. 10.4″ of daylight-readable synthetic-vision, programmable-screen goodness. And the price is defiinitely right. for about 6k, I get synthetic terrain, HITS, moving map, WAAS/RAIM GPS, engine monitoring, all the probes and sensors necessary, and it talks to the Garmin SL30 for radio NAV ops. Not only that, it drives Trio autopilot servos. MGL also has their own COMM, which fits in a standard 3.5″ instrument hole, and communicates with the EFIS via proprietary link over a nice tidy CAT5 cable. They are supposed to be releasing a NAV radio companion to this unit, which is fully SL30 compatible. Oh, and it talks to the ZAON PCAS products as well, and it won’t be long before it will display traffic threats in the synVis.
Daydreaming about this is fine, and the whole “what if your fancy gear packs up at night in IMC” question is answered this way: I’ll be flying day-VFR most of the time. Like 99% of the time. I will probably put a second EFIS in there, probably a secondhand Dynon D10 just in case the Odyssey goes south, but I expect it to function as designed just shy of all the time. I would like to get my IFR ticket in this aircraft, and at that point, I will install TSO’d equipment as required. Until that time, I’m going to be quite content with the current mission of regional cross-country VFR and local hops. How hard is it to get to wine country from SMO anyway? Not very.