As we maneuvered toward McGhee Tyson Airport’s Runway 23R in Knoxville, Tennessee, a trifecta of thunderstorm information gave us a clear indication of how we should thread the needle to avoid a large cell hovering near the airport. We were flying a demonstration of the new Auto Radar feature now available in new-production Cirrus Vision Jet G2+s and eventually as an upgrade to in-service G2 and G2+ jet singles.
We could easily see the gray shaft of rain plummeting downward from the cell’s cloudy base at our two o’clock position, and obviously, we wouldn’t want to fly through that. But at the same time, the Cirrus Vision Jet G2+ we were flying showed additional highly useful information on its two cockpit displays.
On the right screen, we had dialed up the Nexrad weather imagery delivered via SiriusXM Weather’s satellite feed, and while it did show a lot of thunderstorm activity, the information was minutes old and not something we could use for short-range tactical maneuvering. That same cell on SiriusXM hadn’t progressed much beyond an isolated rain shower, but we knew there was more to it.
We had an overlay of the Vision Jet’s Garmin Auto Radar on the moving map on the left-hand screen. That was much more of a real-time depiction of what was going on inside that cell. In this case, the radar was set to automatically capture information from multiple sweeps of the radar antenna then splicing together an image, without any ground clutter, of a sizable chunk of airspace in front of us.
What the image showed us was that a large part of that cell with the rain shaft was full of potential turbulence, depicted in white. If we’d had any remote desire to poke through that cell, which we didn’t, seeing what might lay inside more than convinced us that it wasn’t a great idea. Surrounding that cell were larger ones too, and the Auto Radar picture was a perfect demonstration of the system’s capabilities.
The Auto Radar package adds the 3D volumetric scanning feature set of Garmin’s StormOptix GWX 8000 radar. It’s a simple software upgrade that adds utility to the airplane and makes flying easier when negotiating thunderstorm-prone regions like Knoxville was on that mid-August day.
According to Cirrus, Auto Radar allows the pilot to select the desired radar range, which then automatically scans the area ahead and displays a composite, real-time depiction of the weather. By automatically selecting an optimal horizontal scan pattern and vertical tilt combination, the Auto Radar system works to create an in-depth view of the weather ahead.
It volumetrically profiles areas of precipitation to provide the pilot with a real-time composite view of radar returns. The imagery is clear with a 16-color palette and improved automatic ground-clutter suppression.
I was flying the Vision Jet with Cirrus sales engineer Travis Wellik, and our mission was to see how Auto Radar makes the pilot’s job easier when flying around thunderstorms. Modern digital radar systems already do a lot of work for the pilot, but building a mental picture of a storm while manually tilting the antenna to capture different views can be challenging. Auto Radar does that automatically and delivers a vertical profile image that is much more informative as well as depictions of turbulence.
“This is like real-time Nexrad,” said Vision Jet program executive director Matt Bergwall. “It’s great for new users who are not used to radar.” (Nexrad imagery delivered via ADS-B In or SiriusXM is delayed and can’t be used for tactical thunderstorm avoidance.)
To test Auto Radar, we took off from Knoxville and climbed to 12,500 feet, with the radar displayed on the one-third-pane moving map on the pilot’s display and SiriusXM on the right seater’s full moving map. There were some major storms building to the west, but Auto Radar was showing some fairly strong cells much closer to us than what we could see on the delayed SiriusXM picture—including some that looked to be moving toward McGhee Tyson.
The weather was ideal for our demonstration flight, and I set the Vision Jet on autopilot while we flew inside a large bubble of clear weather, surrounded on most sides by building storms.
While flying westward, we could see some cells at about our 10 o’clock position, from 10 to 40 nm, with the range setting on 40 nm. Switching on the vertical profile display, we could see which of those cells was reaching higher and was thus more dangerous. As they grew, eventually the insides of the cells depicted on the radar display turned white, indicating turbulence—another reason to avoid them.
Returning to McGhee Tyson Airport, we were easily able to dodge around some cells that were encroaching on the airfield, including a rain shower that for some unaccountable reason an airliner flew right through. We could see the cells visually and on Auto Radar, and the local controllers were more than happy to let us fly around them and then line up on final for what turned out to be a smooth Vision Jet landing.