When glass first appeared a dozen years ago, virtually all of the required backup gyros were of the iron variety - vacuum- or electric-powered. Increasingly, manufacturers are turning to glass backups as well, and at NBAA in Orlando this week, Mid-Continent Instruments and Avionics announced its new SAM, a two-inch combined attitude gyro and pitot-static instrument. In addition to providing legal backup, the unit also has a self-contained lithium-ion battery pack cable of of operating the device for at least an hour. In this video from AVweb's NBAA coverage, Mid-Continent's Tom Genovese gives us a brief tour of the SAM.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/multimedia/votw/video-mid-continent-introduces-new-sam-backup-gyro