The Aircraft of Choice

I live and work out of Charleston, West Virginia. It's a mountainous, remote type area, and one of my jobs is to service the coal mining industry. And the weather changes rapidly, a lot of inclement weather. And historically we've flown 407s in that area -- it's the aircraft of choice. This GXi is an IFR-certified ship, which is gonna allow us to not only increase the utilization, but it's gonna make for a much safer operation. The autopilot is set up to level itself -- you go to altitude and hands off, fly the aircraft back and shoot an instrument approach. I'm really looking forward to having that safety reserve with this GXi. The GXi -- wow -- the 407 GXi. I've flown Garmin in a lot of airplanes, with different types of Garmin, and so this is my first exposure coming here to play with it, and the capabilities of it are incredible. I had no idea of its capabilities, and how deep you could drill down to a wealth of information that's inside the Garmin, which makes it much safer, but also from the pilot workload, it takes care of so much for you. The Garmin tells you this is what you need to know -- if it's not there, it's a click away. It thinks through the process and notifies the pilot when something is either out of parameters or going out of parameters, so that as a pilot you don't need to keep your head inside the cockpit and focus on the machine -- you can keep your eyes outside, look for traffic, obstructions, do whatever job you might be doing with the helicopter. And when there is an issue, the Garmin says, hey, take a look at this -- this might be something you want to do something about instead of waiting until it's a real problem. Bell has more service centers than anyone else in the world -- if you have a problem, you're within reach of a technician that's been factory trained, there's a link through the tech rep system right back into engineering, that they're gonna get you an answer and get you back in the air quickly. And with Bell, within 48 hours that part's in your hand more than 90% of the time.