When I am on final approach to a private airport, the IFD doesn't understand what is going on, so it pops up a bogus "Terrain / Pull Up" warning. Worse yet, yesterday evening, on final approach to a grass airstrip where my primary concern at or after dusk is looking for deer on the runway, the IFD went to full brightness about ten seconds before touchdown, severely impacting my ability to see the runway in the dark. I understand that this may have been to call attention to the bogus terrain warning, but it is completely unacceptable for an instrument to go to full brightness in a dark cockpit environment moments before a night landing.

Is there some way to add specific private airports to the database, or to disable the extremely unsafe and distracting change in brightness?  

In the meantime, I suppose I can power off the IFD before landing and use the #2 radio, but that seems like an undesirable workaround.

Thanks,

Miles

"To designate a user waypoint as an airfield, the waypoint must be manually named using the following format “AIRPORT XXXXXFT” where XXXX is the field’s elevation and note that the space is critical in naming the point."

I'll give this a try tomorrow and will report whether or not it was successful. In general, I would prefer to have complete coverage of private airports if there's a way to enable or subscribe to that. 

Hopefully, you will get a more definitive answer, but I can say that we see private airports on the IFD540. We are based at LL22, and never have any alerts when operating there. If the airports on which you have received alerts are grass, you might check the settings on the airport filter on the MAP SETUP page to ensure that Runway Surface is set to "Any". Fuel availability is another factor that could be set to exclude some airports. Let us know what you find.

Regards,

Bob

To the extent that private airfields are part of the Jepp database, they are included in the IFD540.     Bob's note about your map filter settings is an excellent one.   If you've checked the filters and find they are set in a manner that should display/use them and still no dice, then you have two more courses of action you can take.

First, you can create your field to be a user waypoint and tag it as an airfield via the mentioned method in the 2nd post above.  Be sure to use the exact naming convention as described in the PG to include that critical space and FT letters.  If done correctly, that will create a no-known-runway-orientation airfield depiction and stop FLTA alerts.

Second, and some folks on this forum have done so, you can work with Jepp to add that private airfield to their database.  They have a process to do so but I'm not familiar enough with the details of that to comment on what that process is, how long it might take and if there is an expense associated with it.

As for your brightness issue, if that hasn't been resolved yet, it can be.  It's almost certainly due to how you have your lighting setup page configured in Maintenance Mode.  If you can, go to that page in Mx Mode and take a snapshot of the page settings and send them to me or Avidyne Tech Support and we can walk you through some suggested changes.  There is also a description (albeit complex) of those settings in the Installation Manual if you can get your hands on that.