Serviceability of glass cockpit systems

[N201MKTurbo]

I have always wondered about how long these new glass cockpit systems can be maintained.

 

I have been directly involved in the development of electronic devices for 30 years now and I can tell you that the components in state of the art display systems have a relatively short lifetime. By this I mean that the displays and the components to make the displays will probably be obsolete in five years or so.

 

Unless the manufacturer stockpiles a great number of these components, they will not be available in the future, making the expensive hardware junk!

 

I’m sure they will have a new box to sell you for a few more tens of thousands of dollars.

 

My current instruments were designed in the sixties, still work as good as the day they were designed and I can get them repaired for relatively little money at hundreds of shops. I expect twenty years from now I’ll still be able to get them repaired.

 

I'm just looking for peoples thoughts on the subject. Do any of the manufacturers guarantee a service life?

[1964-M20E]

Of course Garmin will be there to gladly sell you a new panel that needs to be rewired, new hole cut and new what ever else instead of a newer drop in replacement that would use existing wiring that fit their previous system.

[John Pleisse]

Avidyne got in over their head with the legacy Cirrus planes. Those original displays are pricey. Garmin and Aspen offer warranties, most not over three years. However, as they populate more ac/panels, it will be in their best interest to provide reasonable repair paths. i think they will all start to crap out similarly in service life, opening up a return-repair-core exchange for these units. Garmin has been fair with their 430/530 screens over the years and their famous WAAS upgrade program was corporate fairness rairly seen in GA.

 

The bigger issue will be evolution of new product and when they will force upgrades and discontinue support. This is the game they play.

 

I own an Aspen system, but I have this recurring dream of flying solid IMC, looking down at an unusual attitude on the instruments and trying to sort it out. The dream is still on steam guages, not the Aspen.

[aviatoreb]

I have always wondered about how long these new glass cockpit systems can be maintained.

 

I have been directly involved in the development of electronic devices for 30 years now and I can tell you that the components in state of the art display systems have a relatively short lifetime. By this I mean that the displays and the components to make the displays will probably be obsolete in five years or so.

 

Unless the manufacturer stockpiles a great number of these components, they will not be available in the future, making the expensive hardware junk!

 

I’m sure they will have a new box to sell you for a few more tens of thousands of dollars.

 

My current instruments were designed in the sixties, still work as good as the day they were designed and I can get them repaired for relatively little money at hundreds of shops. I expect twenty years from now I’ll still be able to get them repaired.

 

I'm just looking for peoples thoughts on the subject. Do any of the manufacturers guarantee a service life?

 

I agree - unless you are talking about a box that has sold a gajillion copies like the 430 where if Garmin doesn't want the service activity surely someone else will step in, then too bad for you.  I worry about the Aspen for example.  There are a lot - but not that many.

 

I am hopeful about the new certification rules coming down the pike - then we will buy a certified Dynon for a few thousand instead of a few ten thousand.  That should help anyway.

 

 

Erik

[aviatoreb]

I agree completely.  I wonder what it will cost to repanel these G-1000 birds when their G-1000s are no longer repairable, and if that will even be possible.  Not a big deal if you only plan to own them for a few years, but a very big deal if you have a life time or even long time ownership horizon.  At least if you convert your steam gauge plane to glass you can always convert it back if necessary.  Not so with the stuff that comes from the factory with glass, I think? 

 

Jim

 

I agree and I put my money where my mouth is - I had a DA40 and I decided I was really annoyed with a lot of things about keeping that bird running was way more expensive than you would think for a 4 cylinder lycosaurus with fixed gear partly because it was new school and partly because of the whole newer certified rules - I could make a list ...but I won't.  Anyway I think it is something like 3 or 4 thousand flat rate for Garmin to look at your G1000.  If something big is wrong then it will cost more.

[OR75]

it as a relatively a small issue down the road.

 

When you think about it, folks who adopt glass technology today will likely continue to want the latest and greatest along the line of dot com world. (even if the line that links 2 waypoints is exactly the same whether on a Garmin XL155 or a G1000 !)

 

I view Garmin today more like Apple than BendixKIng.

 

I wonder how many iPhone users still have the iPhone 1 ? I doubt Apple still supports the iPhone 1.  Obviously not the same unit price but same idea if you use AMUs)

 

Slightly linked to this topic, I remember reading somewhere that Mooney owners tended to be early technology adopters.

[Marauder]

Just a different perspective on this discussion. I did go the glass route (Aspen) and a GTN 650, so I do have some skin (okay, a lot of skin in the game). When Garmin announced the GTN it also announced the discontinuance of the 430/530 series. They backed off of that when fleet operators began complaining about switching cost. Since then Garmin has taken the industry standard support position (we'll support the product while parts last).

Most electronic companies do an annual failure rate analysis during the years the product is in production. Based on the AFR, if a product is discontinued, we normally make a lifetime buy of components needed to provide a set length of continued support. It is costly to hold and maintain this Out Of Production Support (OOPS for short). Beyond OOPS parts are recycled or alternatives are found if needed (either going back to the original supplier and asking for an additional production run or using newer technology). The need for recycling of used parts or alternatives are usually as a result of something that fell outside or the AFR analysis and beyond a normal life expectancy for the product. Like someone holding onto a really old piece of technology (anyone have a KX-170 in their plane?)

[Seth]

I agree with many of the points of this post, that the old steam guages will continue to last and will be inexpensive to fix.   I do have some high tech glass in my airplane - radios (Garmin 430w - not the 650 or 750 . . . yet, but when the 430w dies in 1 to 59 years, I'll think about replacing the box), engine monitors (JPI 830), portable GPS w/WX (Garmin Aera 560), electronic flight book - Ipad 2.  So I do have replaceable avionics upgrades, but my primary flight instruments are mechanical guages as I do not see the budget in the near future for any sort of glass upgrade.

 

That being said, one cannot disagree with the siutational awareness and automation the integrated glass panel GA aircraft provide from synthetic vision to comprehensive data, autopilot, and monitoring control.

 

There is a plus and a minus - it depends on what kind of flying you conduct, your mission, and your budget.

 

I know my second shared airplane taildragger I've mentioned a few times now will probably not have too much glass to keep the cost low in the long run.

 

If I even upgrade my primary aircraft again, such as the 1967 F to the 1983 Missile, I'll let the owner I'm purchasing from sink the avionics upgrade cost into and find most what I want in the panel as part of my search (similar to the Missile - I install the JPI 830 and Aera 560, the WAAS GPS, Autopilot, and more were already there).

 

The G1000, Avidyne, Aspen and other glass systems are fantastic - but yes I do see an issue with upkeep in the far future, not the near future.  Who knows if certain aircraft, such as Cirrus, will have many airframes still flying in 40 years?  Some will, but who knows the wear and tear on the composite airframe at that point, or the price of gas.  Different topics - so we'll get back on track.

 

Glass vs Steam - both have their pros and cons.

 

-Seth

[Marauder]

Well, that might be true for new(er) Mooney owners, but based upon all of the shotgun panels that are still out there in the vintage Mooney fleet, I'm not so sure if it applies to the owners of the older birds. As a matter of fact, us Mooney owners actually have the reputation for being cheap, err thrifty, among the greater high performance/complex GA community, and thrifty and early adoption are practically mutually exclusive.

Regardless, as they age the OEM glass panel birds will be handed down to less and less well-heeled used purchasers. The early adopters and the wealthier among us will have long before moved on to the latest and greatest by the time that the G-1000s become unsupportable, and before that happens the expectation that it is going to happen will have already driven used prices of these aircraft down. Look at the 10 year Cirrus parachute repack phenomenon, except that in this case, instead of a $10,000.00 parachute repack expense, you'll be looking at a $50,000.00 expense in the unlikely event that Garmin is kind and makes the inevitable G-1000 replacement a plug and play affair, or a $100,000.00 expense if they don't. Not a good situation to be in for the owner who is happy with what he/she has and has no desire to upgrade.

At that point there will be a price inversion and the latest steam gauge models to have left the factory will be more highly valued than their later model glass panel brethren. As a matter of fact, those models probably represent a good value on the current late model used market, which seems to be very biased towards glass, for the buyer who needs long body performance, is satisfied with steam, and has a long term ownership horizon.

Jim

You mean this stuff?

[N9937c]

I have a good buddy I have known 40 years and have done business with for 35 years. He owns a FAA CRS avionics shop and every time I mention updating to glass or that another buddy has the hots for a way newer plane and this will involve a glass panel, He reminds me of some of the reasons why NOT to do this.

 

Great plane but no steam guages!

 

I wish some of the early 2000 ish Mooney owners would talk about their WAAS updates. It should make a believer out of you as far as the old technology.

 

larry

[aviatoreb]

I forgot to mention one thing I really dislike about the G1000 concept.  If one thing, no matter how small, breaks, then you need to service the entire unit. At great expense.  In the modular design, whether it be steam guage or even 430/aspen/jpi engine guage, etc - you can fix individual components or upgrade individual components as needed.

[Marauder]

I forgot to mention one thing I really dislike about the G1000 concept. If one thing, no matter how small, breaks, then you need to service the entire unit. At great expense. In the modular design, whether it be steam guage or even 430/aspen/jpi engine guage, etc - you can fix individual components or upgrade individual components as needed.

That's why I opted for the Aspen PFD/MFD.

[Marauder]

I have a good buddy I have known 40 years and have done business with for 35 years. He owns a FAA CRS avionics shop and every time I mention updating to glass or that another buddy has the hots for a way newer plane and this will involve a glass panel, He reminds me of some of the reasons why NOT to do this.

Great plane but no steam guages!

I wish some of the early 2000 ish Mooney owners would talk about their WAAS updates. It should make a believer out of you as far as the old technology.

larry

As a long time Mooney "steam" gauge owner who just joined the "glass" generation, I think there are merits to both. I have flown a lot of hours behind analog with nothing more than a portable GPS for situational awareness. Worked great to a point. I have had my fair share of issues over the years with the King KX-170s, the TKM, the King ADF, the LORAN, DGs, TCs, AIs, heck anything that had a knob or internal moving parts had given me problems over the years. I could wallpaper a room with the number of yellow tags I collected over the years. It became a question of reliability.

My belief is in redundancy. In the picture above, you can see I had dual glide slopes. What you don't see in that in this picture (which was taken right before my upgrade), was that the TKM didn't work, the ADF didn't work and the StormScope didn't work. They all must have known their days were number and failed within a short time of each other. Maybe my situation was unique, but I spent a lot of money over the years repairing old technology.

Time will tell if the decision was a good one to move partially to glass. Reliability is important and if this glass hardware starts to shatter, I will undoubtedly be second guessing myself. So far, "glass" is living up to the hype for me. I flew an ILS recently and was told to expect an extended hold. One button push and I am watching my GTN show a parallel entry to set me up for a perfect holding pattern. One more push and I am watching the AP fly a perfect holding pattern using GPSS. And I mean watching it both on the Aspens and the GTN. In my analog days, a clearance like that would have me turning knobs, timing, watching my drift and trying to get an update on the weather -- and hoping I am staying within the protected space.

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't trust ANYTHING and I have a nice set of "steam" stuff to back up the glass. But it sure is comforting with the additional information available visually to me that wasn't there before.

IMHO if I was a VFR only pilot, I think the situation would be different and I would most likely stay steamy...

[Marauder]

I don't think anyone is knocking glass retrofits in this thread, Marauder. Or, at least, I am certainly not. You can always convert her back to steam or install the next latest greatest, but not 100% integrated, retrofit glass when the time comes. My comments, and I think most if not all of the others, were directed at the 100% integrated OEM glass planes. Only time will tell what is in store for them, but whatever the future holds it will almost certainly be more expensive than those that came before.

Jim

I didn't read it as a knock on glass retrofits Jim. What I saw was a question on the long term support life of the glass stuff. My point was that I had a fair amount of issues with relatively new non glass stuff. Time will tell if glass (and the OEM support of it) fairs better or worse than the previous generation of stuff.

[Marauder]

That's certainly true. But we vintage owners, including those like you who have retrofitted with glass, have a lot more relatively low cost options for maintaining the long term airworthiness of our birds. Those with OEM glass have a lot of eggs in one very expensive basket. That was really the only point that I was trying to make with this.

Jim

And that is certainly true as well. Especially when the product starts with a "G"...

[Alan Fox]

I was thinking just the opposite......Garmin boxes have been out for about 13 years or so , and are still supported by the factory , When they stopped supporting the 28 only models , they made a cheap conversion to make it into the newer style 14/28 version.....Instead of making you buy a new box for waas ,, they gave a conversion for 1500 dollars.... Cheap..... You have companies like Avidyne , who are going into a buisness model of retrofiting old install profiles (tray / wiring / install ) with thier items.... I think the autopilot retrofit DCF series is genious.....  Also G1000 units are modular , each part of the system slides out of a rack in the back of the airplane ..... Garmin flat rate repairs are major cheap as far as Aviation goes...... And MTBF (mean time between failures) are in the tens of thousands of hours for thier line......Bottom line , if there are enough units sold , then the service profitability will last....... 

[M016576]

Flew a single piloted ILS tonight, hard IFR (700-2, BR) in the snowy mountains. My instruments: a mechanical ADI, mechanical HSI, tacan for DME. No auto pilot, so all hand flown. Final approach speed: 160kts. No, not a mooney... My mooney at least has a GPS and functional autopilot !!

All the $1000000 glass displays in the world won't help you if you aren't trained to use them. Sometimes I think guys buy these things to enhance safety, when all they really need to do is just go fly more often...... Rambling...

The cost to replace/repair this stuff will be high. I think that's a given, unfortunately (for those of us at the end of the financial whip, anyway).

[fantom]

...My mooney at least has a GPS and functional autopilot !!

All the $1000000 glass displays in the world won't help you if you aren't trained to use them. Sometimes I think guys buy these things to enhance safety, when all they really need to do is just go fly more often...

The cost to replace/repair this stuff will be high....

 

Amen, bro!

 

Spending 20 grand on your third panel GPS to supplement your yoke mounted iPad 4, but no traffic avoidance gear, precious little professional currency training, obsessing about LOP engine management during critical take-off operations, all causing little visual situation awareness, and a friend to pencil whip your flight review.

 

Make me wonder about GA sometimes.....

[Hank]

Why all the  hulla-balloo about installed traffic avoidance gear? Going by the Nall Report, there are ~3 mid air collisions in the U.S. annually, and a multitude more stall- and stall/spin deaths. Spend your money where it will protect you from the largest threats, not the most visually graphic. Angle-of-Attack should be of interest, as it comes into play at least once on every flight [base-to-final turn], sometimes on departure, and other times. Granted, I've only been flying six years, but even going into Sun-n-Fun, traffic has not yet been a problem. And no, I'm not based at a towered field and I don't visit them often [~3X annually].

[Cruiser]

but getting traffic from ADS-B is free!

[Marauder]

but getting traffic from ADS-B is free!

It's the "getting" part that is not free!

[Alan Fox]

Why all the  hulla-balloo about installed traffic avoidance gear? Going by the Nall Report, there are ~3 mid air collisions in the U.S. annually, and a multitude more stall- and stall/spin deaths. Spend your money where it will protect you from the largest threats, not the most visually graphic. Angle-of-Attack should be of interest, as it comes into play at least once on every flight [base-to-final turn], sometimes on departure, and other times. Granted, I've only been flying six years, but even going into Sun-n-Fun, traffic has not yet been a problem. And no, I'm not based at a towered field and I don't visit them often [~3X annually].

The stall warning is an Angle of attack instrument.... 

[M016576]

The stall warning is an Angle of attack instrument.... 

Not really. A proper AOA gauge tells you the entire lift spectrum of your wing ( ie a replacement for your airspeed indicator, and a much better/more useful representation of your ability to maintain flight). A stall warning just tells you when your wing hits a critical or measured AOA. The equivalent would be a ground proximity alarm vs an actual altimeter. I still maintain its a crime that GA aircraft aren't equipped standard with an AOA indicator. I can't imagine how many lives could have been saved by having one, as opposed to Airspeed, which is an inaccurate and sloppy way to determine your approach speeds and stall margins.

[carusoam]

M,

Very strong and clear message from a person familiar with the use of AOA hardware.

How do we get to the next step?

I have never seen an actual AOA gauge in private aviation, nevermind use one.

Clearly, when the stall warning activates, the plane is close to it's limit already. If it came on as a surprise, understanding the cause may be challenging to the user. Proper reaction to the warning may take too long.

An AOA indicator could give better situational awareness in a similar way a GPS improved navigation compared to the VOR standard?

The number of stall warning hardware failures is quite large. My Ovation's froze between annuals once without much indication it wasn't working...

Best regards,

-a-

[M016576]

M,

Very strong and clear message from a person familiar with the use of AOA hardware.

How do we get to the next step?

I have never seen an actual AOA gauge in private aviation, nevermind use one.

Clearly, when the stall warning activates, the plane is close to it's limit already. If it came on as a surprise, understanding the cause may be challenging to the user. Proper reaction to the warning may take too long.

An AOA indicator could give better situational awareness in a similar way a GPS improved navigation compared to the VOR standard?

The number of stall warning hardware failures is quite large. My Ovation's froze between annuals once without much indication it wasn't working...

Best regards,

-a-

Once you see and use one, you'll wonder why you spent all the brain bytes calculating approach speeds based on your weight, or you'll realize that the approach numbers you use as a rule of thumb were off in one way or another. An added benefit of an AOA gauge is that you can use it to also determine your wing's most efficient state, so it can be used for max range / endurance calculations. Really, when we are flying any "aircraft performance" we gather based on airspeed is just an estimate of the AOA of our aircraft's airfoil. The only thing airspeed is accurate at telling us is a way to compute ground speed! The wing doesn't care about airspeed, it cares about angle of attack... So like you said above, you could liken it to the improved accuracy / SA of a GPS vs a VOR. Yes you can function without the GPS, but you have a direct positional source available to you, instead of a relative position source, like a VOR.

I've only seen on company that offers AOA gauges for GA: Alpha systems. They range in price from ~900 to ~1600. They are a solid state gauge, so they should be more reliable than the stall warning from a probe standpoint (although if a hole gets plugged, would throw it off). It's next on my list of things to acquire... And when I do I'll write a full report for the board, but I spent my AOA gauge money on an overhaul last year, so I'm in the process of building it back up!

One thing I really like about the AOA system from Alpha, is that they have one that is completely independent of the aircrafts other systems, which could come in handy in the event of a pitot/static system failure.