Spent 3 hours chasing a ghost on a Garmin G1000 backup battery swap in Tulsa

I was swapping out the backup battery on a Cessna 172 (nothing crazy, right?) and the system kept throwing a 'config error' that I could not clear. Turned out I was holding the button sequence wrong (you know, user error) but it took me three full hours and a call to my buddy in Colorado to figure it out. The kicker? The whole job should've taken maybe 20 minutes if I had just read the manual twice instead of once. Has anyone else spent way too long on something this simple just because you skipped a step?

2 comments

2 Comments

mianelson9d ago

Hold up, are we really calling three hours a "way too long" situation here? I mean, it's a backup battery swap on a 172, not a heart transplant. You said yourself you skipped a step and figured it out eventually. So you lost two and a half hours... big deal. I've spent three hours just trying to get a fuel sample without getting jet fuel on my boots. Seems like the real lesson is you got it done, you learned something, and now you won't make that mistake again. That's called experience, not a tragedy.

the_wade9d ago

Hold the manual up, the backup battery is behind the copilot's side panel not the pilot's.