I love to fly, and I love our plane. Yet, every time I climb in the plane, I feel anxious, even though I’m an instrument rated pilot with 1,300 hours, mostly in high performance single engine, turbo charged planes with digital panels. I have felt this way for years. It’s not something new. Most of the time, I tell myself, it’s part of the price I have to pay to pilot a plane. Flying is serious stuff. But then, a year ago, after we put in a Garmin panel, I was more anxious than ever before. I had been out of the plane for seven long months, the first time away from the plane this long in 32 years of flying: four months because of an eye disease and cataract surgery, and three months while the new panel was being installed. This is a story about what it took for me to get back in the plane.

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Yes, it's a handy reference guide for a private pilot tasked with learning to fly using an all-digital instrument panel. That’s actually why I wrote the book, to help myself learn how to use the awesome new panel we have. But along the way, I found myself going backward in time trying to understand why flying was always so hard for me, and why our new panel was so overwhelming. Thus, as you read, you will be taking an aviation journey with me, technical and philosophical, while I struggle to master the new technology in our plane and rise above the terrible feeling of “dumb” I had for nearly a year.