Hi Sid, and thanks for your thoughts, encouragement and questions! As for the questions, perhaps you are right, and the final installation isn't completed!
However, I can provide a little insight about what I am thinking! I come from the West Coast and we have mountains and other common types of landmarks to help us along in VFR. Here in Michigan, everything looks the same, at least to me! A field is a field, is a field, and there are lots to choose from. You can overfly Maple Grove airport and never know. A lot of my flying is local, taking the kids to breakfast, etc., and a lot of it is cross country - across the pond to Oshkosh, etc., ALWAYS into unfamiliar territory. Again, this entire region of the U.S. is foreign to me and I will use everything I can get my hands on to know where I am! TFRs are like popcorn in this neck of the woods. It is not at all unusual to get less than a 12 hour notice that over two dozen airports will be closed, and a 30nm 'perimeter' established. It is super easy to 'bust' one if you don't know precisely where you are, and have one radio for comm and another for monitoring a nearby center for advisories. Even at that, several people around here accidentally wandered into a TFR near Chicago last year and got nailed. I generally have EAA Young Eagles with me in the Warrior, and we do familiarization with the instruments and various systems. It made perfect sense to me to take as much of that environment into the KR2 as possible. With my granddaughter (13, and an active helicopter student pilot) it was essential that she have a full panel available in everything she flies. For consistency, and just in case. She can name everything on the panel, be it a R-22, R-44 Bell 430, Bell 47, Piper Warrior or KR2, and she uses everything at her disposal. I have to agree with what I believe you are intimating - that the KR2 is minimalistic, make it fun, etc. And I don't disagree. But in my circumstance, and with lots of spare time now (I'm retired), well, what can I say??? And it really spooked me a couple of years ago when I got out of visual range of Maple Grove and then couldn't find it without following roads and looking for familiar barn roofs! In MI, just as in MD, clouds and storms seems to appear from nowhere. For what it cost me in time and money, I opted to have a horizon gyro present. I don't like winding up in instrument conditions without instruments! The panel looks great, I'm very happy with it. Numerous 'nice to know' items such as voltage, a digital clock, etc. are present now, and the old wind up stopwatch is gone. With great amounts of patience and shopping, the airplane now has a transponder with encoder. It is SUPER easy to stray into controlled airspace around here! Thanks for making me think this through one last time before hauling out the tools and completiing the actual panel swap. Best Regards, Dave.
