Comments on: What fate Avidyne?

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:58:53 +0000

Avidyne had it’s chance and while it had great technology, it failed to build the infrastructure necessary to compete with Garmin. It relied more on engineering talent than business people…..

Avidyne would be better served to sell it’s company to a Rockwell Collins who have the infrastructure…

By: Pat Kelly

Pat Kelly — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 22:08:03 +0000

In my mind it’s all about these 3 things:
Do the features of each unit increase your safety.
Are these features presented in a intuitive visualization that is easily interpreted and understood while in flight, so decisions can be made (quickly).
Is it easy to change the settings on the unit without considerable contemplation.
Whoever provides the lion’s share of meeting these needs, will get the lion’s share of the business.
May the best company win.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Fri, 30 May 2008 21:18:54 +0000

So I’m torn on this. The problem is that there’s no standard design for glass cockpits. For NAV/COM radios they were pretty simple so there was no problem with different mfrs and they were swappable and the functionality was very similar. Now we have the Aspens and Avidynes and Garmins and everyone else doing their thing differently. I’m glad because this means that there will be more training materials/familiarity with the G1000 all around, but of course not glad about the lack of competition for the avionics. But is this just an ‘up-scaling’ of the market to the higher end airplanes where there isn’t any competition anyways since it’s certified only one way? Not sure I know the answer. Maybe the answer is to enforce specific operational modes on the glass cockpits?

However, it does blow my mind that Garmin charges $25 for the G1000 simulator, whereas the 530 simulator is free… you’d think they want it to be free so people are more likely to use aircraft with them. If you know someone at Garmin, please ask them this question!