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The end of a once great company - Honeywell / Bendix-King?

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I phoned their UK branch for technical help with a Honeywell Alarm system and all of the technical help phone numbers were out of date/ did not connect.

It always amazes me when CEO’s don’t even try to get through to their own company by phone or email to see what the response is like. Their response from their alarm division (and other divisions I have dealt with in the past) would 100% put me of purchasing Avionics from them.

Even their formerly reliable 2-port central heating valves have been cheapened so they break down after 4-5 years instead of 20 years. The carbon footprint and bills of all of those heating engineers make the real cost of the valves over a 20 year period about £ 500 ++ now. All very sad that nobody cares about quality anymore.

I don’t like state intervention but I would make it law that the average lifespan of a product in years had to be advertised. Also an extra disposal tax would be placed on stuff that breaks down within 10 years.

United Kingdom

Have been quite well assisted by their US technical department about a TAS failure.
Have had friendly and highly educated technician by email, responding fast.
It ended up with an exchange (costly, but no more than let’s say SkyWatch from what I read here), which arrived quickly.
Of course, I would have prefered the unit did not fail, but once it did, I was professionally helped.
My 2 pennies.

You must have got lucky. Which part of the company was it?

The general feeling I get is that Honeywell buy up companies all over the place, carefully selected for having a good position in their respective markets (e.g. products in aviation which are certified and which everybody is practically speaking forced to use), milk them, and trash them. They have bought up large chunks of the high end switch and sensor business, jacked up the prices and the lead times, and killed off innovation.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Honeywell are terrible. It’s through their mismanagement that the Garret line of turbines are limping along with very few new sales. No innovation, no effort to market as OEM, nothing. An engine series that is very competitive in performance still vs. the PT6. But there seems to be no interest.

I’m sure you’re right, just have been lucky with a product they support and earn money with.
In my case, the transmitter logic board was dead.
Only option was an exchange of the whole computer.
I know they have the capacity to repair them, so they have some technical knowledge remaining.
Probably, they earn a lot in the process.
(I would have loved to find someone being able to replace that transmitter :-))

Last Edited by PetitCessnaVoyageur at 12 Feb 11:22

King radio used the more liberal certification standards inthe GA sector to innovate and then move the ideas now well proven into there topend business jet and airline products.

When Honeywell took over the bean counters just saw the income from topend product and would not spend any money on GA R&D, due to what they saw as modest income from GA the result was the prime movers in the R & D department ( along with it is said some of Ed King’s money ) moved across the street to form Garmin.

The rest as they say is history .

A_and_C wrote:

the prime movers in the R & D department ( along with it is said some of Ed King’s money ) moved across the street to form Garmin.

That’s really interesting, more info here

I’m told the reason that Garmin don’t have DME or ADF in their product range is that they don’t think that they could do any better than Bendix/King ( so Garmin products are compatable ) .

I guess Gary Burrel should know as he worked on the development of these units when he was at King.

A_and_C wrote:

I’m told the reason that Garmin don’t have DME or ADF in their product range is that they don’t think that they could do any better than Bendix/King ( so Garmin products are compatable ) .

It’s clear that the KR87 and KN62/63/64 are very good designs. But they are also very old designs. Shouldn’t it be possible to do better with new components?

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden
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