Good Kit – Delta Force – The World of Aviation

This watch keeps a whole lot more than time – Garmin D2 Delta Aviator Watch, 47mm Face

What you get!

D2 Delta aviator watch with brown leather band
Additional black silicone watch band
Six-month trial subscription of Garmin Pilot™ app
Charging/data cable
Documentation and warranties

The watch we trialled was the midsize (47 mm) constructed with a silver titanium bezel and scratch-resistant domed sapphire crystal lens. The colour screen doesn’t have the same richness you get with Apple Watch, but it’s sufficient when you consider the reality of trying to navigate an aircraft with a screen slightly larger than a 50c coin.

The D2 Delta presents weather, waypoint reference and flight logging features for backup navigation in your cockpit.

On the ground, the watch delivers similar features to other smartwatches with fitness goals, and health and wellness tracking when paired with Garmin Connect. You’ll also be able to receive texts, emails and other alerts.

You can’t use the watch as a phone, however – but then do you really want to be that guy?

It’s useful that the wrist band detaches quickly and easily from the watch face, allowing you to transition from your fashionable leather band to a practical silicon band for the gym.

Fly Direct-to or Navigate flight plans

As part of your Garmin pilot subscription, you’ll have access to a built-in worldwide airport database. Probably the most useful feature is using this database in the ‘Direct-to’ and ‘Nearest’ routing functions by pushing two buttons simultaneously. Practice this on the ground first! Bumping around in the cockpit this can be a little tricky!! It’s easy to pan and zoom the moving map to quickly expand your view of airports, waypoints, weather activity and VFR reference feature such as roads, cities, bodies of water, and so on. By setting your own waypoints, you can navigate to any location not included in the database. In fact, you can even create Mark on Target waypoints to easily reference – and return to – locations over which you’ve flown. Did we mention the “Direct-to” function? That’s about the most useful function we could think of when flying unless you suffer a total avionics failure of course.

Sync up your flight plan

If you have the Flight Stream 510 Connext system it will automatically transfer flight plan changes from your compatible avionics to the D2 Delta. This wireless flight plan transfer also works with the Garmin Pilot app, so your watch will be able to sync with your compatible Garmin products.

Weather with radar overlay

For at-a-glance updates on the weather, D2 Delta works with compatible smartphones to keep you informed. You can access METARs and TAF information. A quick “hot key” shortcut — pressing Direct-to and Down keys — brings up high-resolution radar graphics (NEXRAD), overlaid on the moving map. So, you can easily access the data you need for weather trend awareness and smart preflight decision-making.

The many faces of the Garmin D2 Delta Aviator, configured to deliver multiple layers of information. GARMIN

Automatic flight logging

The D2 Delta series makes flight logging and other record-keeping tasks fairly easy. After takeoff, the watch detects the aircraft’s change in altitude and automatically initiates the logbook function recording date, duration, total flight time and route. Then, after completing your flight, this data is synchronised via your smartphone to flyGarmin.com® and the Garmin Pilot app.

Customisable features

Customisable data fields on your D2 Delta watch let you easily access the data that’s most important to you, such as current GPS groundspeed, GPS track, distance from waypoints/airports, estimated time en route, bearing, glide ratio and other key flight parameters. A handy altitude alerting feature can be set to notify you when reaching or leaving a preselected altitude. You can also select a stopwatch function for timing approaches or flight legs. There are vibration alerts to let you know when you’ve drifted off course or reached your desired altitude, and a bar-based configurable Altitude alert feature will vibrate to remind you when supplemental oxygen is required. There are also various other timer functions with vibrating alerts that activate when it’s time to switch fuel tanks or perform other time-critical tasks – a handy co-pilot on your wrist, presenting some interesting CRM issues.

Check oxygen saturation

The Pulse Ox sensor on D2 Delta PX uses light beams at your wrist to determine the percentage of hemoglobin in your bloodstream and show your body’s oxygen saturation level. Saturation is dependent on a number of factors, including your overall health, breathing rate and activity level. Checking with Pulse Ox can help you gain awareness of how well your body’s oxygen levels are adjusting to the thinner air at higher altitudes. To be honest, we didn’t test this in an aircraft but in our local gyms compression chamber and it seemed to line-up accurately with the other instrumentation.