TrekLawler

Thanks David, I looked through what bulletins I have from Mooney and don't see anything that outlines any kind of upgrade path to the GSM 86 as well as spoke with our OEM director here at Garmin and he's not aware of any offering from Mooney to upgrade these. So it appears the best option will be to send them in for service. @Fly Boomer and @LANCECASPER, thank you for the kind words. the social media operations have gotten so vast in the last 14 years since I first start responding on them that its extremely difficult with all of the new forums and groups on Facebook as an example it is easily a full time job. we're working on some options for this going forward here at Garmin and if these are not in place before my last day the next option will be to send any inquiries to our team at aviation.support@garmin.com. but as the date gets closer I will most certainly provide everyone on the social media sights some options.

Hello David, apologies for not seeing this, I was out of town over the Thanksgiving week and as you indicated in your PM I don't have notices turned on (more on that later). there are a lot of questions and assumptions I can make from your post, but you know what assuming gets you :-). we need to first get some basics of the airframe, what system software is it at currently and is the plane WAAS upgraded? Since this is a 2009 and you mentioned that the servos had to be removed to test, these are the GSM 85 which require testing on a special fixture outside of the plane. if so the dealer should be able to adjust these, if they fall out of tolerance the parts can no longer be purchased and the units needs to be sent in for service under the flat rate repair program. if the plane is needed quickly they can be exchanged through your dealer for the exchange pricing to make the turn around quicker, but the repair process is about 1 week long. As for upgrading, I don't believe this is an option unless Mooney has issued a bulletin which allows this. Just as an FYI, a lot of my notices on the forums are slowly being turned off at this point. I'm in the process of retiring from full time work, Garmin and general aviation effective January 26th. so if there is any questions I'd recommend sending me a PM and I will do my best to get answers as quickly as possible.

OK, I follow you now with what you're describing. this is not any kind of fault in the software and normal operation. the field for the time of departure is always a pilot input field. you as the pilot are required to input your time of departure for the system to accurately calculate this.

my best guess at this point is there is an input missing somewhere on this planning page which is preventing this from calculating correctly. I just did a number of flight scenarios with some of our test kiosks myself and our pilot operations team and in every case the ETE was calculating correctly and counting down during our flights. I also asked one of our test pilots to look at this on a morning test flight in one of our planes and it is working correctly.

@PeytonM, this is not a bad thing, if the system software is up to the latest level and you don't have any issues from the new monitors this is a very good sign that the servos you have will last a very long time and you can wait to have them replaced per our latest SB and get the full advantage of the extended life policy

Hello @Mooney in Oz, I can comment but not anything like what this poster put down. the first question we always ask when troubleshooting is what software the system is at as well as recommending the system be brought to the latest software level. I would not recommend this not be done simply due to it may point out an issue with the servos installed. as a matter of fact if I owned an airframe with a GFC 500 I'd want to know if a servo is having problems so I could get it taken care of as soon as possible. so updating the software is always a good thing at this point.

Hello @PeytonM, I understand and I know our team is working to get a plane to our hangar for some additional testing. however its just been tough getting any kind of commitments on this due to the timeframe that the plane would be needed. we're continuing to work on this daily. my apologies for the delay on it.

hello everyone, I'm sorry for the delay in getting to any questions, as you can imagine the last couple of days have been pretty busy. To answer everyone's questions on the difference between the GFC 500 and 600 servos, the differences are very minimal, if you were to take them apart you'd notice the same motors and a lot of the same components. the GFC 500 servos are very capable of flying twins if needed. as for the questions on the service bulletin we just issued, I can't into all of the internal details, but we've been studying the returns on the servos that have had problems in the field and we basically were not happy with the life of them, so our engineering team made a number of internal changes and it was decided that we wanted to get them all replaced in the field. this does nothing for extending any original new install 2 year warranty, but since there is a finite number of theses servos on hand we're needing to schedule these with our dealers. but are offering everyone 5 years to get these replaced at no charge, in essence a 5 year warranty. so if your plane is flying OK I'd suggest taking advantage of this extended program and waiting as long as possible to get them replaced.if you are having hardware problems then you can get with your Garmin dealer and we will replace all of the -11 servos as well as any non mod 1 -21 part number units. I've been asked if this will address any oscillation issues as well, I seriously doubt it as these changes internally in the servo does nothing to change the gain or software of the system. this mod is simply addressing some component failures we've seen and we want to make sure you have quality servos for many years to come. please let me know if there are any questions. I'm spending quite a bit of time on forums for the next couple of days addressing questions.

Hello Bob, I did receive your email and will respond to it as well, but figured I'd take this opportunity since you mentioned our conversation. we're not just sweeping this under the rug so to speak, we're going to investigate it more closely but as I mentioned and have discussed with a couple of Mooney owners, we're looking at a "J" or "K" model to re-evalaute. so if there are any of these models that are seeing these oscillations and would be willing to allow us to look at your plane, please send me a personal message and I'll be happy to get everyone needed in sync on this so we can try and get these problems resolved.

Thank you for the feedback on this, this is no means our intention to have you wait this long for an answer to anything sent to our inbox. but to give a little background on our process, when an email is sent to aviation.support@garmin.com or avionics@garmin.com it goes to a general inbox that is manned by two of our teams here in our support area. One of them is our Field Service team (which myself and two other managers oversee) and our Pilot operations team. the FSE team normally handles the direct interfaces from our dealers and any technical questions that come from end pilots such as yourself. the Pilot Operations team handles most of the other database, Garmin Pilot, Fly.garmin and operational questions. Our FSE team usually averages around 220 phone calls a day and around 50 emails a day and can usually address these within hours. The Pilot operations team is another story, there are many more pilots then we have dealers calling in and on a database update week can easily average around 400 calls a day and hundreds of emails. but I would hope it would never take that long to get an answer to you. if there ever is a problem and it seems like a long time to get an answer I'm here to help, simply drop me a message with the email address it was sent from and I can look into it in the system and see what is going on, but as I indicated our goal is to get them answered within a couple of days.

It should never take more then 24 to 48 hours to get a response to an email sent into our aviation.support@garmin.com email address. I've responded and assisted Skip with a number questions. but I do my best to monitor the forums (I'm currently on 12 of them) and try and get answers as quickly as possible. but if there are ever any concerns please send me a PM on this forum and I'll do what I can to answer it. This IGRF is a database loaded to the AHRS as it has been explained and happens every 5 years to adjust for the earth's constant moving magnetic poles. in some cases runway numbers are even changed to reflect this change over each 5 year period. as it was posted G5 certified software levels 6.72 and 6.82 did not have the monitors in it to watch this and on January 1st of this year the message shows up. the model is a 2020 version and it normally takes to the 2nd year to show the message. the next one will expire as well on Dec. 31st 2025 and this message will show up again for systems not updated on January 1st 2027.

Good evening everyone, I'm hoping I can address all the questions on this thread in regards to the recent service alert for the GFC 500 we had to issue. the problem very rarely happens, but we've had a couple of reports of it from the field and did verify there is an issue with the system where the pitch trim can go into a runaway condition when the autopilot is first engaged. this can be quite uncomfortable with the plane trimmed out and on a flight plan and then engaging the A/P and it could do this. We've been working closely with the FAA on it and as it has been mentioned is able to be corrected with a softrware update for the G3X, GI 275 and G5 systems. we're diligently working on this as you can imagine to get this all completed, submitted to the FAA for approval and then to the field. the plan is to have this completed by the end of the year. in the meantime the recommendation is to pull the breaker on the GFC 500 or have the Garmin dealer disable the pitch trim function in the configuration of the GMC 507. as for how the dealers are alerted to problems and bulletins like this, no we do not bundle all of the bulletins and send them on one given day. when these are posted to the dealer resource center website for our service centers, it is also sent to the email address we have on file in our system. unfortunately if this email address has not been verified it may not get to the right person(s) at the dealership. but we do our best to re-iterate this when the dealers call into us as well to get the word out to the field. I know I've been working on a couple of things for some Mooneyspace pilots and as you can imagine when this hit a head we had to put our undivided attention on it, but I can assure you I've not forgotten and will get with you as soon as I can on the issues we're working on. Please let me know if there are any questions on this issue and I'll do what I can to get any details out to the group.

Good evening everyone, thank you to Skip for forwarding me a message on this thread. My apologies for not being available sooner on it, we're in the middle of our show season and have been involved with quite a bit of travel this spring which has limited my forum exposure the last couple of months. in most cases when our team starts really investigating these reported problems we can usually narrow it down to an airframe issue, some of you I've worked with can attest to this with some of the installation issues we've had to address, a couple of them even with our team while flying into IXD which is our home airport. but I most certainly understand the concern on these issues and we're here to help. I've read where a number of you on this thread have indicated you or your installer has been in contact with Garmin, but what I'd like to do is organize this a bit, if possible could you please drop me a private message outlining the airframe details, who the installer/dealer is? I'd also like to know if there has been contact with our FSE team and if any assert logs have been forwarded to our teams. I will put this all together to get with our autopilot teams to see what more we can do to try and get to the bottom of these reports. thank you for your patience.

Hello everyone, our software team has been able to duplicate this issue after quite a bit of testing. we found that the issue is not in the G3X software however in the lat couple of cycles of the Navigation database. this will be corrected in the 2204 cycle that will be out in the next couple of weeks.