Bendix/King lost their whole lunch to Garmin and now it’s too late – they’ll never come back. They used to own GA avionics, now they’re like Nokia. Collins ProLine will eventually lose all their business to Garmin too. New jets are sticking G3000 and G5000 units in. Ask any PC-12 owner, jet owner etc what they hate the most and they’ll say Collins. The P180 guy I was talking to said he’d had a $100K+ quote just to install ADS-B from Collins. A database subscription is like $25K/year. Sh*it like that won’t last. And when they realize they’ve lost most of their customer base and start to price competitively, it’s already too late. Game over.
The real tester will happen when Garmin rules it all – then they have a totally captive audience. The temptation to not highway rob their customers is going to be big.
The Collins stuff I have seen in Citations (on a flight in a CJ4 most recently) is built like a tank.
I think having “light GA avionics” like a G1000 in a small jet is actually a great feature as it probably saves the owner a fortune. Anything Proline, Primus Apex etc. seems to be very expensive in every aspect. Look at the Eclipse. I think if they would have fitted a simple G500 it would probably appeal to much more buyers than some special bizjet avionics representing a major financial risk…
How would you compare the build quality of the G3000?
Seems the same as G1000 to be honest. Touch screens but the buttons that exist in say the M2 implementation are similar to G1000.
tomjnx wrote:
Have you ever burned a DVD and were able to read its contents after about a month? I haven’t 8-)
I have burned several DVDs where I could read the contents after 10 years!
How would you compare the build quality of the G3000?
One can’t see the internals but what about the controls? The Collins stuff I have seen in Citations (on a flight in a CJ4 most recently) is built like a tank.
Peter wrote:
Bizjet avionics (Collins+) are of a much better build quality than GA avionics (G1000 etc). It’s very evident from various angles.
I think you will find the boundary has now gone away. G3000 appearing in bizjets and GA.
Stuff like 1990s digital autopilots, GPS navigation boxes and stand alone HSI’s all have processors which all require a program memory, so any argument about memory durability is irrelevant to the “glass panel” vs “lots of independent instruments and boxes” question.
I think there are several issues that cloud the picture.
Bizjet avionics (Collins+) are of a much better build quality than GA avionics (G1000 etc). It’s very evident from various angles.
The old bizjet stuff (e.g. EFIS-40, also found in the TBMs etc) is fairly robust but suffered from poor reliability due to (a) sheer age of some of it, and (b) the vast number of interconnections. In say a King Air there must be 20-50kg of wire, with some of the bundles being 3cm diameter and terminating in a 100-pin circular connector, with 100 crimped pins…. it doesn’t surprise me that Socata report a far lower downtime with the G1000 TBM850 than with the EFIS-40 TBMs.
There is a vastly different level of user satisfaction between glass-cockpit aircraft owners who don’t fly very far from base and whose base has a Garmin/whatever dealer there, and the other three permutations of those two variables 
And I operate the furthest out in that permutation (fly a long way from base and have no dealer for anything whatever anywhere near) and actually that group is not very big… not big at all in Europe, because so few fly a long way away. In the USA, many do fly a long way but nearly all of those have Garmin/etc dealers everywhere.
Hence these debates will run and run.
The worst in Europe is pilots at the extremities (e.g. Greece) who have to fly to Germany or the UK for anything involving more than 2 wires, and they have a hard time because they have to get an airline to collect the plane, and their first post-work-done flight is the long one back home, on which they often find issues but they are stuck with them. It’s a bit like buying a used car from somebody 200 miles away… you will buy it even if it’s a wreck
I personally know people from all these groups, and as I say they have very different opinions. Then throw in a third variable: somebody who understands their aircraft systems in some detail (a small minority) and you have even more fun… there is a huge correlation between that group and the lowest level of user satisfaction.
And CDs/DVDs do lose data after some years. It’s very variable and you never know when it will happen. I would not use them for archiving anything not archived elsewhere as well.
The reason I have some spares on the shelf is because I came across opportunities to pick stuff up fairly cheaply, from people who were throwing stuff out in glass installations. Sometimes, these spares have proved priceless. I wouldn’t say that paying $1000 for a spare KLN94 is too much. The average modern plane (glass etc) Annual is say €5000… (yes I know the fixed price on the price list is 1/2 of that).
achimha wrote:
the media was full of alarming reports that CDs will lose their data after some time
Have you ever burned a DVD and were able to read its contents after about a month? I haven’t 8-)
I have a couple of PC mainboards from the late 80ies still running, and I can observe that their BIOS EPROM is starting to loose their contents. Fortunately apparently only in places not needed for booting, for now…
Shorrick_Mk2 wrote:
Identify and swap?
You mean Peter’s method of keeping a spare of everything on the shelf? Doable but somewhat capital intensive
Identify and swap? Dear Lord. Next thing you know we are going to stop overhauling crankshafts too.
