The Hall of Shame (a Jeppesen, Garmin and Cessna story)

PetitCessnaVoyageur wrote:

What I’m not sure, is if GIA64 are certified for elder aircraft looking for upgrade.

It’s all about software that has to be developed and certified. If manufacturer doesn’t see any profit in doing that, they simply don’t issue development task to Garmin and don’t start certification procedure with regulator. I believe C172 NXi STC works only with GIA63W. AFAIK TBM NXi STC works with GIA64 as well.

Peter wrote:

If I took a few k off somebody for a core feature of a product in 2013 and now told him it is broken, sorry, I would (a) be thoroughly ashamed to have ripped somebody off like that

Then you are operating in a lucky part of electronics. The feature is not broken – it just doesn’t work with the data provided today by a third party data provider.

In consumer electronics we see that all the time: There is no “current data” available for HD-DVD players, none for Hi-8 camcorders, your CompactFlash cards do no longer work in modern cameras, etc. If you sold a computer with a CD-ROM drive to a customer in 2013 would you really feel “ashamed” and reimburse the money for that drive, because these days no meaningful software is available on CD anymore?

The only thing which is special in this case compared to what happens hundreds of times each year is that the prices in aviation are so high (due to a plethora of good and not so good reasons) that the pain somehow feels bigger.

Peter wrote:

AFAIK the payment is just for a key code

The payment is for the software. As with almost any software these days you get a key code to prove that you have licensed the software.

Then you are operating in a lucky part of electronics

Not “lucky” but yes it is the more ethical part of the business.

Also all my customers are much bigger than I am so I need to be a whole lot more careful. That is the main factor in what is happening here.

There is no “current data” available for HD-DVD players

That and the other examples are a completely different scenario to the one in this thread – for various reasons, starting with the negligible price of those items.

PetitCessnaVoyageur wrote:

I’ve read in a separate post, an impressive work from Cessna dealing with the 210 wing spars.
I would have preferred that Cessna answers they do their best to support a whole fleet, and that sometimes it’s at your advantage (210 owners), sometimes not.

it is more about whether it is considered a safety case or not. My point is we as an industry are blessed that 40YO aircraft are supported FOC (even if only for safety cases). Good luck achieving that with a 40YO VW Beetle. (*)

“(*) A different matter is that after a gazillion cars produced, all the bugs (pun intended) would have been ironed out ages ago…but VW could anyway not care less about aging issues 40 years on…

Of course the case in question is different and messed up because the “fault” is driven by (lack of) ongoing compatibility with a third-party product

compatibility with a third-party product

However, the big difference here is that this “third party product” has always been a core feature.

It is not like Fred (a clever bloke) was making a software add-on for the G500 and then Fred discovers girls and decides to not bother with software anymore (pretty much the story with much open source software ) so all those who bought it want to sue Garmin because they never had a contract with Fred directly That sort of “more distant 3rd party” thing has happened too, with e.g. this which got quite deliberately killed by Garmin (and incidentally was never viable in Europe, for reasons mostly to do with the vendor being too lazy).

Peter wrote:

“third party product” has always been a core feature.

Well, the core feature was the display of Jepp charts (which is still available, did I get that right?). The lost feature is the automatic bringing up of charts or groups of charts based on FPL or AC position…was that also a core feature?

I don’t think comparisons with e.g. movie availability on various media are fair. Nor is the view that Jeppesen has changed the data format.

Suppose you had bought a high-end integrated home entertainment (video, audio etc.) system for 10k (say) and at some point it stopped accepting many DVDs because the publishers had begun to divide movies into more than 16 (say) chapters and the software didn’t accept more than that as 16 was though to be sufficient at the time the system was designed – even though there was no limitation in the number of chapters in the DVD format.

In that case I would (rightly, I believe) be upset and demand a free software upgrade and I think that’s more similar to PetitCessnaVoyageur’s situation. The point being that there has never been a limit to the number of NOTAMs. Garmin just set an arbitrary limit because they thought it would be enough.

As the G1000 system can display the charts when selected manually, there is obviously not a hardware limitation so the situation is also not comparable to the problem with older navigators which at some point couldn’t handle the increasing number of waypoints.

I agree that it is a reasonable expectation that Garmin fix this.

Airborne_Again wrote:

I don’t think comparisons with e.g. movie availability on various media are fair. Nor is the view that Jeppesen has changed the data format.

Suppose you had bought a high-end integrated home entertainment (video, audio etc.) system for 10k (say) and at some point it stopped accepting many DVDs because the publishers had begun to divide movies into more than 16 (say) chapters and the software didn’t accept more than that as 16 was though to be sufficient at the time the system was designed – even though there was no limitation in the number of chapters in the DVD format.

In that case I would (rightly, I believe) be upset and demand a free software upgrade and I think that’s more similar to PetitCessnaVoyageur’s situation. The point being that there has never been a limit to the number of NOTAMs. Garmin just set an arbitrary limit because they thought it would be enough.

As the G1000 system can display the charts when selected manually, there is obviously not a hardware limitation so the situation is also not comparable to the problem with older navigators which at some point couldn’t handle the increasing number of waypoints.

I agree that it is a reasonable expectation that Garmin fix this.

An excellent analysis.

I agree that it is a reasonable expectation that Garmin fix this.

Which will never happen because work order has to come from airframe manufacturer who doesn’t have interest in financing development of the fix.