I get a feed from a US FB site selling avionics. Nearly everything on there is either overpriced GNS/GTN boxes, or incredibly decrepit old stuff like this
It’s made me realise that in the US you can actually get this stuff installed – either (most likely) separately (to replace an item) or as a whole system. In Europe nobody will touch it – except swapping boxes off the books (“no EASA 1 form, sorry, and nooo we don’t believe that Part-ML concession is valid; take your business elsewhere if you want to push that” 
)
Over here, everybody wants you to spend 20k+ on anything to do with autopilots or some such.
No wonder US GA is so much more healthy. The ability to maintain old stuff transforms the % uptime of an aircraft.
I had that type of AP in my old PA44, it was okay but every now and again it would decide to do strange things.
A company at La Rochelle (LFBH) used to strip it down and rebuild. Sadly the wife of the guy who did it died and he just quit.
I think there is still someone at LFFK (Fly West) who still does this sort of work. I haven’t had the PA44 for some years now. but I think he is still there because I heard he fixed someones Kap140 on a DA42 recently.
@Peter I suspect once an avionic shop is dealing with turbine equipment, it only wants to consider a major panel upgrade if an SEP turns up.
Getting a pragmatic quote for some simple avionics work is proving frustrating. Am surprised they don’t price in simple stuff at £80-100 an hour which is a typical avionic shop rate. They seem to want the aircraft for weeks, although hopefully will find a shop that might be willing to carry out the work.
Perhaps there is seasonality when the summer arrives, but then the engineers will be on holiday?
My guess is that a lot of people decided to get avionics work done while the ‘guidance’ had them grounded, but there is not a surplus of good avionics shops anyhow.
I’d also suggest that small and bespoke jobs can be fiddly for them, with lots of discovering that you need unusual connector X or rarely-seen part Y halfway through the job, which means the aircraft taking up space in your facility while you wait for what you need to be delivered.
Finally I’ve never really wrapped my head around why they quote and bill so many hours for installation jobs that, when it comes down to it, involve screwing in some hardware and connecting up some wires. I guess that no two aircraft are the same so even if they’ve worked with that kit before every job involves a fair amount of time scratching heads, tossing around ideas and working out solutions – time for which they expect to be paid. This question permeates many professional services – to what extent should the customer expect to pay the service provider to learn how to do the job? The most outrageous example of this is franchised car dealers charging by the hour to ‘investigate’ faults – it’s their product and they expect customers to pay them to learn about it!
Peter wrote:
In Europe nobody will touch it – except swapping boxes off the books (“no EASA 1 form, sorry, and nooo we don’t believe that Part-ML concession is valid; take your business elsewhere if you want to push that” )
Not sure how this works but apparently you can get them checked and installed if you insist. Primarily, those systems will however be used as spares for existing installations or sometimes as upgrades. I know of people who had a Brittain System installed in a Mooney as an upgrade to a wing leveler without any problem.
Parts as shown here can in theory be certified airworthy either by an US company with a relevant tag or also by European licensed companies after benchtests, the latter being a question of finding someone who is willing to do that at a price which is worth. There are still people who can work with this kind of equipment however. I believe Avionic Straubing has an AP guru who knows those things inside out.
Peter wrote:
In Europe nobody will touch it – except swapping boxes off the books (“no EASA 1 form, sorry, and nooo we don’t believe that Part-ML concession is valid; take your business elsewhere if you want to push that” )
Yeah, if you ignore that something is possible, you will remain with impossibilities.
Yet, this is the reality here, mostly.
Who wants the job of educating European avionics shops?
It’s not easy the find a good avionics shop in the US either and in general they also want the airplane there for ever and a day. However, part of the problem is that the panel of any (older) airplane is a can of worms. Once you open it, you cannot go back and have no idea what you might find. When our club 182 got an upgrade to dual G5s thy pulled out about 20-30 pounds of unused cabling – but first had to figure out if these things were really unused or were doing something! I have a picture of the box with all that junk somewhere, as the shop called me to stop by and have a look. Impressive, is alI can say.
The question is, if the installed legacy A/P will be so much cheaper given that (completely independent of paperwork) you need to test it and install it, compared to a new digital A/P. Also, you might need to adjust the legacy A/P to a different airframe.
If you intend to do this yourself, be my guest. You can use our hangar and tooling.
I wasn’t suggesting installing some 1970s stuff as a new installation. Nobody would do that. The old stuff has various issues e.g. electrolytic capacitors used in the control loop time constants, which dry out. I was talking about the ability to keep an existing installation working, by replacing all or part. Sorry if that wasn’t clear.
In the US you can get this done.
In Europe, nobody will touch it (except off the books; there are still some boffins around, working out of sheds 
). And this drives so many to ripping out autopilots which have some issues and spending xx,xxx putting in some new stuff.
