The biggest problem in avionics is that product development cycles are long and that is bad for the engineer’s CV. So the companies find it hard to retain staff – in the US where the job situation has always been dynamic.
You see this in the form of poor reliability (basically poor design – this is a field I know well, as a hobby and a job since the 1960s) among most of Garmin’s competitors. This is improving but once Company X gets ahead it tends to stay ahead in what is a very conservative market. It is conservative because so many people have had their fingers burnt.
Garmin also engage in what in a market leader would be called anticompetitive practices, with proprietary interfaces, etc. But everybody does this if they can. Many years ago IBM were forced by the US govt to publish a load of stuff, as a condition of being allowed to bid for US govt contracts. That in turn enabled other companies to make IBM plug-compatible products (I was doing that in the 1980s). In avionics this will never happen because the market is too small to pop up on anybody’s radar.
But I don’t think this is a primary reason for GA difficulties in Europe because GA in the US faces the same problems. In Europe you get unique pressures, which a lot of people are side-stepping by moving to uncertified aircraft and operating them “under the radar”, from small airfields, grass strips, etc. But many people can’t do that so there is some way to go before this trend fully plays out across Europe (it already has pretty well done so in Spain and Italy).
arj1 wrote:
if you want the non-Garmin certified solution with an A/P to be RVSM-compatible
RVSM has not yet been a requirement for me.
I am mainly talking of small piston airplanes. There you can go different and I always will as long as I can. I would never touch a G1000 legacy plane as upgrading is almost impossible and totally expensive. Therefore I much prefer a normal solution such as an Aspen with an independent navigator (no matter whether Garmin, Avidyne or which ever as long as it’s supported) and an AP which works with all of this.
In general I find monopolies a bad thing, not only for the competition but even for the market leader themselves. Without constant challenge and the need to improve, they simply will sit on their laurels until someone puts them out of business. Happened many times.
The UK AAIB has published this report
AAIB_Annual_Safety_Review_2023_pdf
Notable in it is the UK decline over 2003-2023
The recovery after 2020 is probably just the post covid effect.
By contrast, in most of Germany (Bavaria excluded) there never were any flying bans and in some regards, GA hours got a boost from Covid in 2020 and 2021. I don’t know the net effect, but I guess the graph looks a bit different for Germany.
I confirm. We had 2020 one of the best years in my former German flying club. 2021 was good as well. 2022 had a slight decline, but still better than 2019.
boscomantico wrote:
By contrast, in most of Germany (Bavaria excluded) there never were any flying bans and in some regards, GA hours got a boost from Covid in 2020 and 2021.
You flew in spite of the strong recommendations against it of the Deutscher Aeroclub??!! Shame on you! 
Indeed, in Sweden light GA got an enormous boost from Covid. My club had a 50% increase in flight time from 2019 to 2020. Then it started to back off and last year we were back to pre-covid figures.
Flying was never banned here in the UK during covid. What happened was
(no; I don’t get it either)However that blip is just a blip on the long term downward trend. Are there European countries where GA annual hours (excluding CPL/IR training) are up since say 2022?
It depends whether or not you are including UL in the GA mix.
Certainly I would say the post Covid blip for SEPs/PPLs has perhaps started to descend across France. It certainly has in this area. Maybe the larger cities are experiencing something different.
But I think one has to factor in that this area has had pretty poor VFR flying weather since the beginning of the year.
gallois wrote:
Certainly I would say the post Covid blip for SEPs/PPLs has perhaps started to descend across France
Norway too. Covid literally flooded the PPL scene with FIs that were over eager to fly. They are all gone now, and new PPL students have a difficult time getting hours. There’s no incentive to even give theory lessons anymore. Haven’t seen any real numbers though, but it’s nothing like the last 3 years.
