Ultranomad.
That was my first thought but is the 540 as good as the 750!
Rob, opinions vary. Some people think it’s even better than 750. There are emulators available for both, so you can compare them firsthand.
The value of old avionics is dependent on the need of the buyer, a KCS55 compass system could be found in the USA for less than $1000, however if you have just the HSI in Europe with a form 1 and a flying school with an aircraft that can’t earn money until it is fixed the HSI unit would probably make £1000.
The cost of taking out an old system and replace with a modern unit could easily double the price in lost business if the replacement is unscheduled.
Rob wrote:
If you were to do an avionics upgrade from a 530W to a GTN 750 ads in/out txp etc maybe £30-40k what percentage of this would you expect to recover at sale of the aircraft say 12 months later.
An avionics upgrade doesn’t increase the value of your plane;
But it can help to prevent a decrease compared to the other planes competing with yours on the market when you’re selling yours.
Overall conditions equall, you have to expect that other owners upgrade their avionics over time, so if you don’t, your value goes down.
The answer depends on the aircraft and its usage.
I can fly completely fine around Europe with a KLN94 and a KMD550, which is basically late 1990s stuff. If I was buying another TB20GT I would look at the airframe and engine first. Avionics one can always fix by throwing some money at it.
So you may get some of the value but you might also not get anything.
Also depends on who installed the equipment. In Europe and especially the UK, there are very very few good shops and a lot of bad ones. I would not buy a plane which has its engine overhauled by some cowboy. Well, I might but would discount it by the engine overhaul. That would lead to the seller telling me to stick my offer somewhere warm and dark, because he will always find another buyer who doesn’t do due diligence.
To be a contrarian again, I’ll say that fixing up an engine is a known worst case scenario (buy new). Once you get started down an avionics refresh rabbit hole who knows where you’ll end up. Something that starts out as a simple $10k job may very well morph into something much bigger. You know much better than I do how much a King servo costs – how many of those do you need to pay for a GFC500 install on an approved airframe? Which just goes to show that of course, a full avionics panel redo (everything and the kitchen sink) might well exceed the cost of a IO540, or, in my case, a TSIO-360.
Doing avionics piecemeal is a viable approach, but the finished cost will likely be higher than an all-at-once approach. Planning in advance will save money, time and aggravation. It will also allow one to pick the new toys as they appear and get approved – look back 5 years and now, how many shiny toys trickled down to the certified world from the experimental world.
Either way it is a lot of money, time and effort. The learning curve surprised me, and still does.
I agree keeping a panel up to date makes sense for turbine equipment, and possibly for high end sought after SEP IFR (eg A36). Single pilot IFR keep to the acceptable minimum, although exchanging vacuum gyros for new AI/EHSI is today a practical proposition.
By definition the best $ spent on SEP is on highest quality airframe and power plant maintenance.
Avionics one can always fix by throwing some money at it.
“Some money” can sometimes be pretty high amount. E.g. upgrading G1000 to G1000 NXi for DA42 costs €180k (at least that’s what Diamond asks). And that’s the only possibility to upgrade the avionics (for the time being) since it’s part of aircraft’s type certificate.
As a comparison, for that money you can buy 4 CD-135/155 engines i.e. you can replace them twice which is 4200 flight hours.
