Anyone had a Garmin flat panel display fail in flight?

[JimB]

On 9/15/2021 at 2:28 PM, PT20J said:

I'm curious if anyone has had a display failure, since I often hear a lot of concerns about redundancy when planning new panels.

I have owned many computers, televisions, iPhones, iPads and various auto and airplane flat panel displays over the past 30 years and I've never had a single display failure. In fact, the only computer failures I've had in all that time are two hard disk failures, a memory card failure and a couple of laptop batteries that swelled. (I've stopped buying Dell laptops).

Skip

I manage the maintenance on a fleet of 45 Garmin G1000 equipped flight school aircraft with almost 70,000 total fleet airtime hours and 90,000 hours of hobbs time (displays are on) over the last 3 1/2 years. Not a single display failure. Changed some PFDs/MFDs from knob/button mechanical failures and a couple of GMAs, but really that's it. 

Edited September 23, 2021 by JimB

[PMcClure]

On 9/15/2021 at 10:43 PM, Vance Harral said:

The most interesting display failure story I've heard was in the early days of the G1000, when a pilot I was talking with at a fly-in claimed the analog dimmer dial on one of their flight school's 172s failed in a way that caused both the PFD and the MFD to go to minimum brightness, which made them unreadable in daylight.  No help from reversionary logic, because neither of the displays actually failed.  They were just receiving a "normal" input to go to min brightness.

This did not happen to me, personally, and I have no way of verifying the story is true, but it's plausible.

I had this very thing happen to me on a flight School C172. But it was during taxi, not flight. 

[carusoam]

1.3MM for 45 G1Ks….

Thats a lot of AMUs in just the hardware… 

Thanks to JimB for supplying the cool fleet info!

Best regards,

-a-

[2659AU]

On 9/18/2021 at 10:03 AM, thomas1142 said:

Not a single issue with the PFD. I am considering installing a blower fan for that purpose.

Just an assumption on my part, but when I touch the screen of the unit it is way warmer than the 10”. I asked the avionics shop if something else back there could be overheating the unit. They did not think so, but I feel that is exactly what is going on. 

@ thomas1142 ... Did you ever have a resolution to your G3X problems? We have also now had 3 Garmin units (not in our Mooney) and still no resolution after almost a year. There does seem to be a pattern associated with warmer weather. 

[jlunseth]

I had an MX20 screen go out a decade or so ago. We bought a used market replacement. I don’t remember exactly what the problem was, but generally the screen was going bad. I had an Apollo GSP go a decade ago but that was internal, not the screen. Have seen plenty of screens develop a line or two that won’t illuminate correctly, but don’t recall that happening on avionics.

I had a problem with the auto dim on my JPI. My original unit did not have auto dim. Some time after JPI came out with auto dim I sent my unit in to upgrade for CiES senders. It came back with auto dim. It would dim all the way to black and was not recoverable without rebooting the screen, which of course meant turning the Master off and on in flight, or the breaker. Even then it would auto dim to black again. Sent back to JPI, never really worked out. I think they just disabled the auto dim, the unit was better off that way.

Edited January 21, 2023 by jlunseth

[thomas1142]

9 hours ago, 2659AU said:

@ thomas1142 ... Did you ever have a resolution to your G3X problems? We have also now had 3 Garmin units (not in our Mooney) and still no resolution after almost a year. There does seem to be a pattern associated with warmer weather. 

The problem seemed to “have resolved” itself after the third unit. Installer just kept sending the unit back to Garmin, and just like that after the third unit all was fine. I was never told what, if anything, they did to resolve the issue.