Apart from the competition 
there are few obvious barriers to entry.
You don’t need any approvals; you don’t even need the facade called ISO9000. In fact, with a nice website and well organised production, you could build the stuff in your garage (which is true for many businesses today, which could not have been started say 20 years ago). And if you sell direct to end users you don’t need even ROHS, REACH, ENxxxxx, Conflict Minerals and all the other compliance crap.
Or so it seems…
The reason I am thinking about this is because some of the stuff sold into that market seems to be badly made junk. I don’t mean the glass products (some of which may be junk) but little things like individual gauges and instruments.
I have a very good friend who is an electronics design engineer who asked me the very same question recently.
I told him I thought the chances of making any real money are slim due to it being such a small market but let me know by PM if you want me to ask him if he’d be interested in talking to you about it.
I think the European market may be small but the US one is a lot bigger.
I would say yes.
All aviation could benefit from more manufacturers, both certified and uncertified.
I also would agree that many small businesses can make a difference. Love and care about their products, no 8 till 5 support for example. I also think that many benefits for everyone can be reached by working together with other small business.
I think open standard for communication is a must, this will ensure that it would be easy to implement.
Peter wrote:
I think the European market may be small but the US one is a lot bigger.
Which doesn’t stop some US non-certified avionics manufacturers from having parallel websites in European languages Somebody must be buying from them in Europe.
The European ultralight market is huge (in relative terms), comparable to the US experimental market. EFI/FADEC for Rotax engines is one thing. EI for Lycomings and similar is another that needs more competition (The only available is the E-mag/P-mag today + some quasi “professional” full FADEC systems that costs more than the engine). LED lights are either very expensive, or complete junk (or home made, lots of people like to make these themselves for some odd reason). Electronic fuses and stuff. MGL aviation have lots of smaller individual gauges. There are lots of stuff available, but not that many manufacturers, so most of it is not junk. Most people likes to minimize electronics to glass and GPS, with steam backup of ASI and alt. Some only want hand held GPS as the only electrical thing in the plane.
Electronic fuses is something that really simplifies things, and only two manufacturers (1 and 1/2 maybe).
Non certified, low weight and compact VOR/NDB/DME etc would in fact also be rather cool. Lots of people like to navigate VFR old school (without GPS), or have some real and alternative way of determining position, instead of 5 iPads in the bag. Don’t know if non certified DME is even possible/legal, but VOR and NDB should be I guess. For IFR you need certified avionics anyway, at least the GPS has to be certified (RNAV) also in homebuilt.
I am a believer in small companies mating up to achieve something special, provided the owners interrelate well of course..
So, Peter and Jesse, where are you waiting for? As to a good name, well, just hussle around your names a bit and you’ll come very close to ‘Jeppesen’, which may be of benefit
It would be a good idea to have more manufacturers in GA. We allready do some design and production work for mainly customized GA products (Annunciators, CO detectors, Air Data Computers, Flight Recorders etc.
Others, like Sebastian, are also producing nice equipment.
IMHO EASA should also have a look at the FAA-PMA system. EASA lacks this, and therefore it can be difficult to produce and certify certain products. An FAA-PMA is far more suiteable for small business then a fully certified design / production and maintenance approval.
I was specifically thinking of doing some standalone thingy.
Autopilots need a lot of flight testing, otherwise you end up with crap (like certain certified ones). And a lot of R&D.
An example would be a fuel totaliser. Totally standalone, but needs to cope with various GPS serial streams. Or a fuel gauge system. Or an engine monitor.
I don’t think EASA will ever allow PMA because it would do its Part 21 mates out of work. But also you can fit FAA-PMA parts to EASA-regs, anyway (despite claims to the contrary, it goes on all the time, openly, though perhaps not on AOC planes). Mine had loads of PMA parts put in by a UK Level 2 (?) 145 company, when it was G-reg.
I’ve been working on a standalone turn co-ordinator with a needle controlled either by a servo or a galvanometer… progress stalled at present due to other commitments but the basic electronics are there at a cost of about £10 in parts. I haven’t taken it up in the aircraft yet, or made it a nice box, or looked to see how well it deals with vibrations, but on the ground it seems to work fine. Some of the micro servos use just 10 milliamps. It seemed to me that quite a lot of microlighters/VFR aircraft could benefit from a cheap one, as it would make inadvertent IMC much more survivable.
An AI seemed to me to be non-trivial and the idea of making electronic versions of altimeters, ASIs offended my sensibilities in that I doubt a battery powered instrument would be either lighter or more reliable. Ditto for a variometer. An electronic DI seemed another achievable possibility though.
I would also rather like a cheap NDB, VOR, DME nav system. Even if you can’t use them for IMC navigation, you could practice instrument procedures in cheap aircraft (with a friend) and it’s always nice to have a backup to GPS. The thought also occured that you could make a ‘virtual panel’ that you could velcro into place for the sake of practice navigation, using a GPS module and pre-programmed NDB/VOR locations, then use it to train instrument flying in cheaper VFR aircraft. I suppose the cheapest way to do this would be to simulate one on a tablet… Probably been done already?
