This discussion has convinced me to put it down on the nearest field and troubleshoot on the ground, however----

Assume you are in the clouds, everything with ship’s power is zapped but the engine is running and the airframe still flies.  The pitot heat that was keeping occasional ice off is gone and so is the airspeed indication.  You have an “all electric” airplane like many of us are planning, just to paint an ugly picture.  What will you do?

For less than $1000 a Garmin 196 GPS with its 4 AA Batteries will not miss a beat.  The “Panel Page” has; for those of you who may not have seen it, a usable presentation of a HSI, VSI, Altimeter, Turn Coordinator and Ground Speed plus all the other GPS info.  Aviation Consumer Magazine has established the airplane can be flown with a Panel Page as the sole reference.  Seems to me this little piece of redundancy could be the most reliable and cost effective piece of safety gear aboard.

These discussions make you think about the what ifs.  The temptation would be to press on to the destination if it appeared the problem had been isolated but it might be the first link in a chain of events.

Steve Colwell