I gotta say that I hope that our industry sees as much progress in 2018 that we saw in 2017! Like it or not, we’re part of an industry that is notoriously slow with progress. For many years, GA airplanes got products 10 years after heavy iron had them, but what can we expect with the past record of the FAA. There was little to no progress from the time the Wright brothers flew in Kitty Hawk, NC in 1903 to 1950 as aircraft position was crew calculated. Twenty three years after that we saw progress with Mode C and then again in another 20 years we got Mode S. Fast forward to 2010 from there and we get ADS-B. My point….our industry doesn’t exactly have a track record of moving at gazelle speed.
Because this is a Blog, and not a magazine article, I’m only going to focus on the retrofit auto-pilot market to articulate my point. Prior to 2017, people coming into our shop were really looking at two choices for auto-pilots for their certified airplanes. They could go with S-TEC or the Avidyne DFC90, and the prices were not for the faint of heart. In 2017, we saw Garmin, TruTrak, and Trio get in that game with STC’s for the Cessna 172, Cessna 182, and the Piper PA-28 with promises for further certified aircraft STC’s coming. In one year, the industry more than doubled the options for a major portion of the GA industry? That, my friends, is big progress!
To be clear, not all of these auto-pilots are equal either in performance or in price. Some are GPS only and some can do it all, which is exactly what the industry needed...an option for aircraft owners with different missions. For the aircraft owners with higher performance aircraft like the Beechcraft Bonanza and Baron, Garmin has been moving forward with GFC 600 3-axis digital auto-pilot. From what I am told, Garmin has a Cessna 210 coming in this month to start the STC process for the GFC 600, so if things go well, we might have another option for Cessna 210 owners this year. S-TEC released their new 3100 digital auto-pilot recently and it has an STC for the Cessna 210, but only in a 2-axis configuration. Looks like we have some competition for our business now and the likes of TruTrak, Trio, Avidyne, Garmin, and S-TEC are going to be competing for our business. What’s not to like about that?
I’d love to talk with you about progress in our industry or about any of these auto-pilot systems. Feel free to contact me and we’ll chat it up! Oh, one more piece if progress that I failed to mention earlier! Sparkchasers has a new Vlog that we’re excited about and we hope you check it out. Not sure what a Vlog is? It’s just a Blog in which the postings are in video format as opposed to written. If you’d like to check out our latest Vlog, Click Here and enjoy!