I am helping a colleague with a fresh installation of an STEC 55X autopilot and the dates on the STC drawings are mind boggling: 1985 is the earliest. This is a current product which is being widely installed.
How did STEC manage to capture the market for such a long time and even today?
I’ve been told they “got in under the wire” before the regulations tightened up.
That’s more recent than many of our airframes and engines were certified.
So? In the end, it’s not “new” that’s better, it’s “better” that’s better.
or extremely expensive certification and development costs stifle innovation and improvement?
Why invent something new, if customers still buy that old stuff?
Genesys bought STEC business to cash in investments, not to do a bunch of pilots good.
Given the current alternatives, there is little room for justification of a new install of such old technology.
@Peter: What special situation and circumstances are given for your colleague to actually do that?
The owner of the plane wants a new autopilot, I assume. The plane is an old one, not made for decades.
The 55X is still being installed in planes for which there is no other STC option, which is… most of them 
Well, unless you want something even older.
Off_Field wrote:
or extremely expensive certification and development costs stifle innovation and improvement?
if it were true, yes.
if it were true, yes.
We may be in agreement as regards normal avionics (where every mess a manufacturer gets into gets blamed on certification but is probably mostly due to poor processes, lack of money, lack of production QA resulting in bad publicity resulting in more lack of money, etc) but it seems to be true for autopilots which do require a lot of flight testing, at least nowadays. The STC is specific to every airframe and in most cases to every engine option too (e.g. a turbo variant is a different autopilot STC to a non turbo variant – as some have found out to their cost, sometimes a long time after the installation during which the installer did not spot the error) and that means a lot of work.
STEC managed to generate their STCs during an earlier and more favourable era.
That’s more recent than many of our airframes and engines were certified.
Sure, but there are understandable reasons why those airframes are not made anymore (lack of demand basically). The engines are still manufactured however, in nearly all cases, but again there are clear reasons why they have not changed.
I was just really surprised as the age of the STEC stuff.
