Dynon AP Might Just Happen...

[Shadrach]

15 minutes ago, cliffy said:

How about Lucas Electrical - The Prince of Darkness in car electronics !

It matched the panels in my Rolls Royce:-) :-)

What’s the metal switch(?) to the left of the ignition?

[cliffy]

Its not a switch Its the data USB for the Dynon 

Has to be connected for all the charts to pop up on screen as they are not resident in the Dynon. 

[PT20J]

I spoke with a Dynon rep at the NW Aviation Conference yesterday. He said that they are proceeding with the J and K to be certified together, but for some reason the FAA won't go for including the F. That means that to certify the F, they will have to start over. They have other make/models in the pipeline, so unless something changes, the F will probably not happen anytime soon.

[EricJ]

The process is just dumb.

 

[Hank]

1 hour ago, EricJ said:

The process is just dumb.

 

Gov't bureaucrats have no incentive to work hard, work quickly, work efficiently or even work accurately. 

Having a bad system is just a result of many such bureaucrats modifying one portion of the system after an incident,and ignoring the effects of the change on other parts. My whole career has been increasing efficiency of operations, and garbage like this is just infuriating! In private business, it wouldn't be acceptable, or the company would close, but the gov't just hires additional bureaucrats. 

[EricJ]

In my experience the people working in the agencies aren't the problem.   Most of them are there to do useful work in areas that they're interested in and they're there because they like the work.   The issue is that government agencies are bound by the laws and restrictions placed on them by governing bodies (e.g., congress, in the case of federal agencies), and their procedures developed over time through various laws and litigation results placed on them over the years.   Basically, their hands are tied by the laws and procedures and regulations that they are obligated to work under.   The days when agencies could be flexible and adjust to new conditions are gone due to all the usual reasons, including that it's really the only way they can CYA when somebody gets upset and complains because it didn't go the way they wanted, which is pretty much everybody when it comes to government agencies.

VARMA has been touted as a great new development, but it's really just a subtle change in procedure that allows the FAA to write a letter saying that somebody properly followed existing regulations, so that somebody later doesn't come along and try to undo it based on a different interpretation of the reg.   They couldn't do that in the past, so even though they may have wanted to and thought it was a great idea, the procedure to do so had to be vetted and reviewed and approved before it could be turned into an actual procedure that they can follow and point to and say, "that's what lets me do that".

When I said the process is dumb, what I was thinking of was that thirty years ago when I was developing avionics for airliners, which at the time was heavily scrutinized and tested and verified, etc., there was such a thing as "qual by similarity", where you could show all the stuff that was common to the last time a similar device or function was certified, and shorten the approval process for the new one to only qualify the stuff that was new or different.    That was for airliners that carried hundreds of people at a time many times a day.   And it was practical because otherwise it'd be too expensive and take too long to improve airliner design and avionics design.    The dumb part is that for avionics for a four-seat Mooney, they're saying a small vendor trying to cover probably a few hundred, maybe a thousand opportunities to replace a 50-year old autopilot has to start over to qualify the same autopilot for a model only slightly different than another.    I'm sure there are regs or procedure documents somewhere that were generated by following other binding regs and careful review to assure compliance to established law and procedure and legal constraints that came from litigation somewhere, but that difference in process is dumb.    Given the stuff going on at Boeing it appears to have gotten even dumber over the latest decades.  

Anyway, small rant there.   The FAA has a self-conflicting mission, which makes it even harder, to simultaneously promote and regulate aviation.   We want it to be easy and accessible and fun for everybody, but we also want it to be extremely safe.   Making one better takes from the other, so I am somewhat sympathetic to the difficulty of their mission, but clearly they're not getting it right in a lot of things regarding GA.

 

[Schllc]

I agree with most of what @EricJ to a point, and that is the interpretation of the regulations.  I do not have experience with the FAA, but I have encountered bureaucracy and government employees in many venues. And one of the interesting parts of the rule books is that they are largely written by people with myopic goals, and this inevitably causes conflicts in their own rules. 
specifically, a bureaucrat will find an excerpt from a rule which appears to prohibit your request, meanwhile you profer an alternate interpretation, or a different section of the code, that actually permits you request. At this point the bureaucrat digs in his heels, and it becomes a war of attrition by someone with unlimited time and money to argue. It’s at this point the system breaks and they all rally around the restrictive interpretation and make it an ego thing, completely forgetting the entire reason they are there is to service the customer. 
They have no competition, therefore no real inherent incentive to be cooperative, so they stamp your request failed under the guise of “their liability”.
They are free to interpret the rules however they choose, you are not allowed this liberty. 
the rules for these things are usually either incredibly poorly written, or they are using tortured interpretations. 
Perhaps a case could be made for each length version the short, mid, and long body, but to exclude arbitrarily because of a version designation which constitutes minor changes is not the intent.

The FAA need a complete overhaul of the rules for GA, they are horribly outmoded.  Or at least a rewrite of the process for approving innovation.  Most of these laws were written when a lot of these advances were not even an idea, much less a reality.

I may see the point of saying it isn’t “the people., but it is absolutely the culture, it is an inevitable route for any public entity.  Ultimate authority with no competition, never makes it better. Ever. 

[cliffy]

We (and I include the FAA in "we") have the ability in our hands to have one of the greatest SAFETY DEVICES ever installed in small GA 

airplanes. 

It can prevent many instances every year of accidents and deaths and yet because of bureaucracy people are dying every year 

The new small-AFFORDABLE autopilots with the "One Button Push to Level" feature can be and is that Safety Feature I speak of.

How many "Inadvertent flight into IMC conditions" do we see every year? How many deaths come from that every year? 

How many lives could be saved every year with this feature? Yet we fiddle while Rome burns! Its ludicrous!

We are faced with an entire fleet of aging GA airplanes  all of them equipped with half century old avionics and instruments

WITH PERFECTLY USABLE ALTERNATIVES  in the form of "non-certified" instruments and radios that can be just as reliable and usable

(as proven in experimental airplanes) and yet they are out of limits for simple small airframes. 

Most of GA (MOST!) by a wide margin, does not fly in IMC conditions

The risk factor is small to use these A/Ps in these airframes for VFR conditions AND they could be used as a safety valve for inadvertent

IMC encounters. Saving lives. 

Similarly (with the above limitations in mind)  flight instruments could be done the same way, Affordable replacements to half century old

flight instruments to further enhance safety with NO risk to safety. Yet again we fiddle while Rome burns!

There is no valid reason why we couldn't have CERTIFIED airframes MAINTAINED to certified rules and regs and yet allow

NON-certified electronics to be installed in VFR airplanes with a cautionary placard much like experimental airplanes do today. 

"THIS AIRPLANE USES NON-CERTIFIED INSTRUMENTS AND RADIOS"

Where is the safety detriment? The airframe is still maintained to the certified standards and only the reporting of those items normally read

on the panel is different. 

There is the added benefit (life saving strategy) of straight and level flight if inadvertent IMC or Loss of Control is encountered.

Yes we do have "APPROVED" autopilots and glass panels but the certification process is so broken that the price of entry is way beyond the 

ability of most small GA airplane owners.  Safety for the masses is available at a price they can afford yet we bar entry through bureaucracy.

 

We have our entire segment of aviation (small GA) at risk of disappearing due to lack of ability to safely modernize the fleet to keep it active. Our segment 

is going away slowly and we can't do anything about it because of bureaucracy!

 

I watched a webinar about the "fantastic VARMA system" now available. What a joke! We wait for MASAIC- from all I see it too will be a joke in the

areas we need- trying to keep the fleet alive!  Sorry to be pessimistic but if we don't solve the affordable electronics questions our segment of aviation

will die and go away.

Last comment- I saw a question asked just the other day- What will happen when the G1000s are no longer  supported by Garmin? Do we just crush those Mooneys so equipped because they can't be modified? The problems are not limited to just the G1000 airframes. 

 

 

 

[cliffy]

2 hours ago, Schllc said:

The FAA need a complete overhaul of the rules for GA, they are horribly outmoded.  Or at least a rewrite of the process for approving innovation.  Most of these laws were written when a lot of these advances were not even an idea, much less a reality.

Its just the same as ADSB- EVEYTHING starts at the top and we in GA have to "fit into that envelope"

ADSB IS AND WAS designed for121 ops to decrease spacing along high traffic arrivals by using more accurate position data than what was available just using RADAR. In order to sell it to the masses (GA) (and make them pay for it) they had to include Weather and Traffic to get us to buy in (proven fact by there admissions). So it is with panel electronics and their approvals. It all comes down from the top. We don't have our own  "less risk" niche. 

[EricJ]

2 hours ago, cliffy said:

How many lives could be saved every year with this feature? Yet we fiddle while Rome burns! Its ludicrous!

We are faced with an entire fleet of aging GA airplanes  all of them equipped with half century old avionics and instruments

WITH PERFECTLY USABLE ALTERNATIVES  in the form of "non-certified" instruments and radios that can be just as reliable and usable

(as proven in experimental airplanes) and yet they are out of limits for simple small airframes. 

I think you're right that the "experimental" airplanes have demonstrated, for decades now, that there are an awful lot of gadgets that are perfectly safe to use on airplanes.   What is the benefit of an experiment if you ignore the results?  

Unfortunately I think we may be past the tipping point where the declining number of GA pilots and aircraft removes any significant motivation for reform.

[Hank]

33 minutes ago, EricJ said:

Unfortunately I think we may be past the tipping point where the declining number of GA pilots and aircraft removes any significant motivation for reform.

You're right, all pilots of certified non-air tranport planes deserve to die so that the bureaucrats charged with our safety don't have to work very hard . . . .

[Pinecone]

I wonder if some enterprising manufacturer might work with a friendly FSDO to NORSEE some of the experimental stuff into certified aircraft.

 

[cliffy]

1 hour ago, Pinecone said:

I wonder if some enterprising manufacturer might work with a friendly FSDO to NORSEE some of the experimental stuff into certified aircraft.

 

Someone mentioned here a while back that that was tried and poo-poo'd by the Feds as not a way they would go for autopilots even though NORSEE SPECIFICALLY STATES THAT AUTOPILOTS ARE ONE OF THE ITEMS THAT NORSEE WAS APPROVED FOR!!

[Yetti]

This is all on the FAA.  Their miss on the Boeing is what gummed up the works.  Basically the paperwork for Dynon sits on the desk for months at time waiting for the guy to sign off.   People have tried several ways around the Seattle guy.   But all the Autopilot stuff goes through there.   The Baron is done.  So maybe the Mooney will get it's way through.

For those that ask, the Autopilot software is already in the Skyview screens/computer.  Along with the D10A has the autopilot software.   It is just a matter of hooking up the servos and configuring the autopilot.    Funny enough when they sell you the system the STC for the Autopilot is included as part of the whole system, so the plane is kind of already STCed for the Autopilot.

[PT20J]

The Dynon engineer that came out to make measurements recently on my J told me they are working through the FAA in Anchorage, not Seattle. Dynon’s still working on the J and K certification. It’s not done and sitting on a desk somewhere. From what the engineer told me, it seems they began the process with the J and K together as one certification and then thought to add the F later and the FAA wanted more data on the F. But, I didn’t grill the guy. It’s always satisfying to understand why things are the way they are, but the important point is that, for whatever reason, the J and K are in the pipeline and, at least as of today, other Mooney models are not. 

The intent of my post was provide the latest available information, not to bash Dynon or the FAA. 

[LANCECASPER]

On 2/26/2024 at 10:16 AM, Pinecone said:

I wonder if some enterprising manufacturer might work with a friendly FSDO to NORSEE some of the experimental stuff into certified aircraft.

 

Trio did this: https://trioavionics.com/Certified Autopilot.htm

Trio reached out to the Mooney community here 5 years ago and a few people said some things that ran them off:

 

[Yetti]

4 hours ago, PT20J said:

The Dynon engineer that came out to make measurements recently on my J told me they are working through the FAA in Anchorage, not Seattle. Dynon’s still working on the J and K certification. It’s not done and sitting on a desk somewhere. From what the engineer told me, it seems they began the process with the J and K together as one certification and then thought to add the F later and the FAA wanted more data on the F. But, I didn’t grill the guy. It’s always satisfying to understand why things are the way they are, but the important point is that, for whatever reason, the J and K are in the pipeline and, at least as of today, other Mooney models are not. 

The intent of my post was provide the latest available information, not to bash Dynon or the FAA. 

If you will note the F is listed on the certification schedule.

 

"Mooney M20

• Exact submodels and serial number ranges are TBD and subject to change.
• Dynon's M20J demonstrator aircraft represents “mid-body” M20F-M20K airplanes, and models within this group are the most likely to be approved in this project. The M20-M20E “short-body” airplanes are similar; it may be possible to approve some of these in this project as well. This project is not likely to include an approval for “long-body” M20L-M20V airplanes."

 

Dynon tried going through Alaska but it still goes through Seattle for the Baron. 

 

Edited February 27 by Yetti

[PT20J]

The engineer told me that they switched to Alaska after completing the Baron. All I know is that the engineer told me that they were certifying the J and K together and looking at the F, and the salesman told me that the latest was that the F would not be included with the J and K. 

[KSMooniac]

Boeing embarrassed the FAA with the Max debacle, specifically the Seattle ACO (Aircraft Cert Office).  Unfortunately due to Dynon's geographic location, they mapped to the Seattle ACO.  The FAA has vowed to never be embarrassed again, and the certain way to do that is to never approve anything.  Ever.  Their funding, promotions, existence, etc. are not tied to any performance metrics like number of new approvals.  

I believe Dynon "moved" to the Anchorage ACO last year, but I'm not sure if they requested it, or if the FAA re-assigned them to help them get approvals.  Even with all of their progress and history, you can bet the new ACO engineers on their project also don't want to be embarrassed, so I bet they had to spend a lot of time going over previously submitted data.  Maybe it will ultimately be faster than sticking with the Seattle ACO, but who knows.

Garmin reports up through a different ACO, with different interpretations of rules, etc. and are able to get things through much faster.  I don't believe it is because Garmin is "better" either.  Harmonization between regions of bureaucracy is a fantasy.  And all of the Garmin servo failures/service bulletins/recalls probably make things go slower for Dynon in an ironic and sick twist of fate.

[cliffy]

To bad we can't have ACO  shopping like we have US Court shopping

Federal Agencies both. 

[Matthew P]

Spoke with them a couple weeks ago, anticipate 6-12 more months before decision letter from FAA, barring any delays...they won't know which models will be covered until they receive the decision letter...I'm not expecting they will get anything inside of 18-24 months, if that...hopefully I'm wrong but I'm not willing to wait any longer...would love Dynon, but looks like Garmin

[Shadrach]

On 2/27/2024 at 4:57 PM, PT20J said:

The engineer told me that they switched to Alaska after completing the Baron. All I know is that the engineer told me that they were certifying the J and K together and looking at the F, and the salesman told me that the latest was that the F would not be included with the J and K. 

I would like to ask the powers that be what they believe the differences in relevant parts comparability is between an F and a J. It’s absurd. I have no desire to change airframes, but  understand why folks throw their hands up and go experimental.

[Hank]

1 hour ago, Matthew P said:

Spoke with them a couple weeks ago, anticipate 6-12 more months before decision letter from FAA, barring any delays...they won't know which models will be covered until they receive the decision letter...I'm not expecting they will get anything inside of 18-24 months, if that...hopefully I'm wrong but I'm not willing to wait any longer...would love Dynon, but looks like Garmin

I don't want just an AP! I want the full Dynon SkyView, but Garmin is so darn picky about compatibility between their AP and non-G electronics, and even those that they do work with don't get access to all ifnthe AP features.

Nit sure how much longer I want to nurse my Brittain units along . . . .

[PT20J]

24 minutes ago, Hank said:

I don't want just an AP! I want the full Dynon SkyView, but Garmin is so darn picky about compatibility between their AP and non-G electronics, and even those that they do work with don't get access to all ifnthe AP features.

Nit sure how much longer I want to nurse my Brittain units along . . . .

It's not that they are picky -- it's the way the GFC 500 was architected. The software is distributed. Much of the software, including the flight director, resides in the PFD. Some of the autopilot software resides in the servos (Garmin calls them "smart" servos because they have a microprocessor and software). It's unlike a B-K or Century or S-TEC.

[PT20J]

47 minutes ago, Shadrach said:

I would like to ask the powers that be what they believe the differences in relevant parts comparability is between an F and a J. It’s absurd. I have no desire to change airframes, but  understand why folks throw their hands up and go experimental.

I don't know for sure, but it sounds like Dynon started the J and K together and then only recently realized that the F is like the J. But, although we think of the these planes as just one model or another, Mooney tended to make changes along the way and each one has to be researched and analyzed to determine if it matters or not. The reason the engineer came out to visit me is that I have a 1994 J and they noticed part number differences between early (of which they own an example) and later model Js. Sometimes the part number change has nothing to do with dimensions and sometimes it does. Also, sometimes apparently Mooney changed dimensions but used the same part number if the parts were interchangeable. You cannot tell without the manufacturing drawings which Mooney does not release. So they have to make measurements an actual airframes. In my case it was an elevator bell crank he was interested in, but he also noted that my rudder push pull tube is not the same diameter as the elevator push pull tube and in Dynon's airplane they are the same.