What's new
Van's Air Force

Don't miss anything! Register now for full access to the definitive RV support community.

Lifespan of an EFIS system?

scard

scard

Well Known Member
Advertiser
What do you think the usable lifespan of your installed EFIS and it's associated system components is? I come from a datacenter environment where we migrate away from something very old BEFORE it fails. I'm expecting my 7yr old efis to fail. It is proving me correct. What is your expectation?
 
Of course this depends on the EFIS.
I have had my GRT Sport going strong for over 4 years.

Based on experience designing notebooks and tablets, I wild say the display should have the highest failure rate. Touch panels will have a high failure rate also. With high being between 1 and 2 percent.
The high nits (brightness) will cause some issues.

But overall I would say they are built solid and should last many years. 10 years would not be a surprise. Just like all electronics, I think new technology will cause the replacement.
 
After just spending a bunch of money for a system that does so much more than I will ever use, I thought about this quite a bit.

One thing I would be willing to bet is that we will not be seeing these current "State of the art" EFIS systems being used in our planes in 20 years.

Today when Garmin announced they now display the old steam gauges, I thought that was great. If a person is looking for their system to last for decades, old style may be the way to go.

Even if it may not make the most sense, I am still drooling waiting for my panel!
 
Scott - you are indeed wise to be looking at the service life aspect of your instruments. One of the biggest drivers in lifespan of cockpit displays is the cold cathode fluorescent tubes used in the display backlights. They have a tough life, and from the day they leave the factory they are burning up their finite lifespan. The more power cycles we put the displays through, the more quickly we burn up that lifespan. How many years will they last? Depends on a lot of factors outside the control of the pilot/user.

Most of the other components in an EFIS should give many many years of service. Certainly far more years of service than the iron gyro instruments they replace.

Our Dynon D100 has now had a full 7 years in service and hasn't hiccuped yet. It still has the original internal battery which continues to have excellent capacity. I'm impressed with this unit and hope to have similar experience with the GRT instruments in our project airplane. At least the GRT Mini has LED backlighting so might not have that life-limiting factor common to so many other displays.
 
Obsolescence

In the good old day products had planned obsolescence built-in. No longer the speed of innovation is such that technical obsolescence (TO) holds the day. TO usually occurs when a new product or technology supersedes the old and it becomes preferred to use the new technology in place of the old, even if the old product is still functional. So, functional life is quite different from useful life.

Glass replaces the six pack. Glass replaces glass. ?? replaces glass ... It's only a matter to time and the acceleration of technical innovation.

Generally, useful life depends on the user.
 
chazking said:
Generally, useful life depends on the user.
Click to expand...

Generally (meaning ambiguous), ok. Apparently We cycled a hardware wire on the board in one of our units. Design in the box that only makes so many (flight) cycles is the source of this conversation. Internal wiring that you've never seen in your efis is very important.

So, I'm very happy. I have a mission critical computer running X to paint the display that lasted 7 years, before a simple connection failure. Wow, I think that is the best one could expect for mission critical equipment.

Failure IS an option.
 
Watch the heat

We fly the **** out of our airplanes...maybe 8+ hours a day, 6 days a week. The "old" ones (4-5 years old) have already had the avionics replaced a few times. Our mechanics say its the high heat from the bubble canopy and parking them in the Florida sun, we just cook the displays.

I am wondering if a display can be replaced if the unit is sent back to the manufacturer (or even better would be a field replaceable unit).
 
Going on 11 years

My dual GRT Horizon, single AHRS has been going strong for over 10 years. The only issue I had was a loose video cable last year.

1200 hours
Gary
 
11 year old D10 still going strong with maybe 2000 hrs and a pair of D100/D180 with 900+ hrs in 4.5 years and now skyviews........

Beats Vac Pumps etc.
 
I think that EFIS are falling into the same lifecycle as personal computers.

Unfortunately, that life span is pretty short. It's been awhile since I was procuring PCs in significant quantities, but then the life span was only about eighteen months from start of design to the end of production manufacturing. It may be different today, but I suspect it may even be shorter.

As software goes through a phenomenon called "creeping featurism" it gets to a point, where it needs more cpu and better video processors to run. This also takes advantage of the hardware gains of Moore's Law.

So I think the demand for new features/functions will force the replacement of current glass as oppose to a component failure causing them to be replaced.

bob
 
Canadian_JOY said:
One of the biggest drivers in lifespan of cockpit displays is the cold cathode fluorescent tubes used in the display backlights. They have a tough life, and from the day they leave the factory they are burning up their finite lifespan. The more power cycles we put the displays through, the more quickly we burn up that lifespan. How many years will they last? Depends on a lot of factors outside the control of the pilot/user.
Click to expand...

LED's are replacing these fast which is a good thing!
 
Some of the "original" EFIS systems, Collins EFIS 84 for example which is CRT based, are still in useful service. It was just last year, Collins announced end of support. IIRC EFIS 84 was introduced circa 1984, so a 30 yr life (someone who really know please chime in).

Most modern avionics have MTBF's in the 10,000 to 20,000 hour range, which means that for small airplanes the desire to have perhaps reduced weight and the new features or looks will likely outweigh reliability with respect to driving upgrades.

Clearly, modern avionics are also caught up in the electronics industry part obsolence issues. Many avionics manufacturers that I work with are always predicting part needs past 3 yrs so that they can purchase suffient key parts that might go obsolete, to support production through EOL.
 
autopilots also

The gyros in our "fancy" autopilots also have a useful life as demonstrated by our recent (last week) failure of the gyros in our Trutrak DII VSVG. It was installed in our RV7a seven years ago and has had 1250 flight hours. It is in for repair so we flew our RV10 to NH last week. We upgraded the EFIS three years ago but the wiring is now 7+ years old. Scott, would you share more details about your failure?

We are flying the granddaughters out for lunch today so will upgrade our GRT HXs with the new software.
 
scard said:
In another thread somewhere. Display wouldn't paint an image. Repair was "Replaced display cable."
Click to expand...

I think a good corollary to the EFIS lifespan question is the quality and cost of continued factory support. Your display was built 8 years ago and the internal cable repair cost you $125 to fix. In the world of consumer electronics, the low repair price, availability of parts and factory support for discontinued equipment seems like a really good deal to me.

Reliability issues are bound to crop up with aging systems, and this is where you need to make sure you have independent back up instruments if you fly in IMC. But that goes for any system, analog or electrical, certified or experimental. I've talked to hundreds of people at air shows for 2 years (and even before working at GRT) and the cost of replacing bad mechanical gyros always creeps into the conversation. Weight and maintenance cost of the mechanical analog stuff seems to lead to many decisions to install glass.

When I flew some of the first G1000 Diamond aircraft in 2006, we wondered the same thing-- How are these going to stand the test of time? They cost nearly $80,000 and are wired into the bowels of the airframe and engine--Will the screens last longer than a personal computer? Will I get the "blue screen of death"? How will we replace them and at what cost? I'm curious to see what those panels look like now after 9 years of hard service in a flight school parked outside in the Tennessee sun.

I think over the past decade, GRT has answered the replacement/upgrade question for our customers by supporting our older units and making our new display units compatible with the wiring, AHRS and EIS of our old systems. As longtime customers like Gary point out, they are often reluctant to replace their original WS systems because "If it ain't broke don't fix it!" But many have upgraded to newer displays fairly easily to get new features, better graphics, fresh hardware, and more processing power.
 
I think the only down side with the ?EIFS? route is that you are locked in with one specific manufacture/model in terms of wiring and space on your panel. I love my GRT system and in over 5 years I have not had a single issue with them but I can?t help thinking/worring what will it happen if the company is not around to support it or simply have the ability to buy another one of the same system to replace it if it ever breaks.

But I would add that the commitment and support that I have seen from GRT eases my mind a great deal in that regard.
 
KatieB said:
I think over the past decade, GRT has answered the replacement/upgrade question for our customers by supporting our older units and making our new display units compatible with the wiring, AHRS and EIS of our old systems. As longtime customers like Gary point out, they are often reluctant to replace their original WS systems because "If it ain't broke don't fix it!" But many have upgraded to newer displays fairly easily to get new features, better graphics, fresh hardware, and more processing power.
Click to expand...

I hope this is where we're headed in the long run, with all the manufacturers. Modular systems that allow for replacing components to upgrade to newer technology as it arrives. Screen independent of computer independent of AHARS. I'll stop short of suggesting that they be interchangeable between manufacturers... While there's no technical reason they couldn't be, the marketing departments at each company would have fits if you could replace your Garmin computer with a GRT computer and continue on.

It wouldn't be much different than steam gauges, really... Airspeed from one manufacturer, Altitude from another, Horizon from another, G-Meter from another. You never hear of compatibility issues between steam gauges. :)

I still think that making use of the screens we already carry (iOS/Android devices) would make more sense. We're more likely to upgrade them on a shorter schedule, and stay more current with technology. If we could leverage that to keep our aircraft up-to-date that would be excellent. The iLevil guys seem to think that way as well.

My short-term upgrade plan is to build a new modular panel for my -6 that would allow me to replace sub-panels to change from steam gauges to a Tablet/iLevil combination to a Dynon/GRT/Garmin system as time goes on. The only thing it wouldn't allow for is the 36" wide whole-panel capacitive touchscreen that i'm waiting for someone to design... :)
 
The question I ask myself is "support".

Katie makes their point. Scott's unit was 8 years old (from MFG date) and still had support. Some of our equipment may get EOL'd in less than 8 years. Some may get EOL'd before it fails. Some may get EOL'd before it ceases being useful.

So there is a cascade of milestones in the life of our equipment (the order is questionable):

  1. manufacturing of equipment
  2. purchase of equipment
  3. first use of equipment
  4. needed / desired capabilities of equipment (this could shift anywhere in this list)
  5. cost-effective supported lifespan of equipment (will the cost of a repair exceed the value or upgrade)
  6. supported lifespan of equipment
  7. lifespan of equipment
 
I think I commented elsewhere that I am quite pleased that my 8yr old computer still works at all with all the time it has spent riding around in a less than ideal environment. Hence the question of what we think our realistic expectations are.
 
Snowflake said:
I'll stop short of suggesting that they be interchangeable between manufacturers... While there's no technical reason they couldn't be, the marketing departments at each company would have fits if you could replace your Garmin computer with a GRT computer and continue on.
Click to expand...

Why stop short???

We should be shouting this from the mountain tops.

Proprietary software/hardware only benefits the manufactures IMHO, not the users.

As I understand things,ARINC 429 is already the standard of the industry for the big boys, and it is used in some of our stuff-------why not go all the way??

GRT has done a great job dealing with outside vendor compatibility as can be seen here. http://www.grtavionics.com/compatible.html
 
Mike S said:
Why stop short???

We should be shouting this from the mountain tops.

Proprietary software/hardware only benefits the manufactures IMHO, not the users.
Click to expand...
Which is exactly why we won't see the vendors cooperating. Others have tried working with the big manufacturers to bring them together to discuss cross-compatibility, but the success was limited. They all started out suggesting that the other vendors change to match what they were doing, nobody was interested in working together to make a common interface.
 
The internet is largely based on open standards, and yet the companies that make products for it largely do well from it.

Arguing in favour of closed systems only works if you don't have good interoperability.

The problem is no one is arguing in favour of more open systems ... that would need to come from the experimental avionics users first and foremost ... it's tougher to do in certified avionics because of some of the standards that need to be met.

ARINC 429 is ANCIENT.

CANBus and ARINC 825 is where it's at for our market. Most of the modern EFIS' use CANBus' just their own special sauce version of it.

I've actually got some ARINC 825 code running on arduino and such at home, I've been playing with this, seeing what's needed. With the right open specs and tools, there's NO reason we couldn't have truly interopoerable "LRU"s ... I've been dreaming of drafting an open ARINC 825 profile and creating supporting tools ... but ti's a long road ... any software engineers here? :)

Not to mention that the competition would bring costs down (and/or features up) and really help bringing aviation to more people in the long run.

Many of the best open standards started either in academia, or as grass roots efforts ... seems to me that would be the way to go here too, don't expect established vendors to just start playing nice with each other.
 
The big gorilla is sitting quietly in the corner. Our cool screens are expensive to design. Santa Claus does not contribute. Each manufacturer is required to issue paychecks twice monthly to the engineers and software writers. If their $ are over at the competition building... the paychecks bounce.
Then the Blue Mountains are just a pretty place and not a source of modern glass design. I get to see behind the scenes each week in the avionics industry with everything from ADS-B, EFIS, AHRS, P25 digital com radios, CO detectors and Iridium com boxes. It is all very expensive to design. It is compromised in modern times because the components come primarily from the consumer electronics industry. ie. cell phone technology. Whereas... in the past, the military and industrial demand for components drove the designs to a higher level of robust nature. Tolerance for heat, reliability of discrete components, long term availability of IC's is all a changing landscape these days.
Having said all that.... this week I launched into marginal icing conditions and drizzle in Nevada at 12K feet. The turbo 210 was doing ok performance wise... but the iron gyro that decided to have an insidious failure in the form of pitch up first... followed by slow roll to the right... while in IMC----
At that moment... I was missing the solid state MEMS derived attitude in my RV big time. Thankfully the S-TEC rate based gyro didn't care what the attitude indicator was doing. Center gave me lower... I dialed in VS command of -400fpm and kept my hands off the yoke. I am going to work on convincing the aircraft owner to look into Aspen.... rather than spend further dollars overhauling the old gyro. We are all very lucky to be flying in an era where the Cheltons and Garmins and Free Flight GPS receivers are giving us situational awareness that was sorely missing for many years.
 
Nick makes a very excellent point, as do several others here. The BIG problem with the costs and associated recovery of said costs is just in the scale of what we are dealing with. Compare that it took Garmin over 10 years to sell 100,000 GNS units (which seems pretty darned good)...until you realize that it probably cost many, many millions to develop. You have to spread that NRE cost over a VERY small (in the consumer electronics type world) number of units, over a very long timeframe. Most folks with that kind of money don't want that sort of ROI horizon. Couple that to the fact that IC's and other discrete components are rarely designed specifically for our components (means the mfgr's have to use COTS stuff that was/is developed for other markets) and some of it will be beyond their control.

Contrast this to the fact that the famous fruit company sold more new phones a couple weeks ago in their first HOUR of sale than Garmin sold GNS's in EVER in 10+ years....that's why costs are what they are. You simply cannot in any way/shape/form compare avionics costs (and NRE and such) with anything else consumer related (internet, software, etc..) that much larger audiences use. The costs are spread out amongst many more users in a much more compressed timeframe.

Regarding lifespan, many other very good points have been made. Open source common interoperability at this point is a pipe dream in our world, but in the heavy iron world I come from it's a much different story. MTBF's, MTBR's, etc.. are calculated down to the minutes, but conversely these units may see many thousands of hours per year and many hundreds of cycles. The Airlines and Boeing have a lot more leverage than we in GA do.

I think we're starting to see systems as a whole maturing a but more, with more improvements coming from software and ancillary devices over core system changes. CCFL's are pretty much long gone in this world, as are other bits of technology (Smart Media, Compact Flash, etc..). I suppose some of which we use today will face a similar fate as newer technologies come on board, but at least it's not as bad as phones or PC's.

Just my 2 cents as usual!

Cheers,
Stein
 
Stein, as always you bring a POV that is both the high road and educated truth.

If I assume an 8 year lifespan on an EFIS with data subscriptions and compare that to 8 years of "apples" plus service it becomes an interesting perspective.
 
Last edited:
Give me a CANbus and we can work miracles!

Your car has been running this technology for years and it has stood the test of time.
 
SteinAir said:
Contrast this to the fact that the famous fruit company sold more new phones a couple weeks ago in their first HOUR of sale than Garmin sold GNS's in EVER in 10+ years....that's why costs are what they are. You simply cannot in any way/shape/form compare avionics costs (and NRE and such) with anything else consumer related (internet, software, etc..) that much larger audiences use. The costs are spread out amongst many more users in a much more compressed timeframe.
Click to expand...
This is *exactly* why I think we should be leveraging the consumer market as much as possible. The screens on modern tablets make every EFIS on the market look like a 1980's video game. It's almost embarassing.
 
There are plenty of industrial rated ICs with extended temp support and such ... The main CPU manufacturers have long-term supported chips, including Intel.

Some technologies like CANBus actually matured in larger markets (i.e. automotive and the liked) so the prices and economies of scale are already there.

There's no doubt design can be very expensive, but you have to separate the certified and non-certified world. Having seen what it takes to create a certified products, it's absolutely mind-boggling. I understand why a GPS costs the price of a small car, and there's little to no way around it. Part of the problem is that entire systems, not just components, have to be certified together (for now anyways).

With experimental avionics, this is not required, so our market is much more primed for the use of things like open interfaces, protocols, etc. Create a common CANBus-based protocol (full stack, not just the bottom 2 OSI layers!), create some test tools and such, develop against the standard, certify against the standard, and voila.

Give the DIY nature of home builders, you'd think you could get a community growing around this and kit-build avionics :)
 
I certainly can't argue with the previous two posts, both make good points!

I'm not trying to be a negative nelly or a pessimist, but I am trying to note the realities. I know of at least a half dozen people who have "rolled their own" open source EFIS with good success (with plans to perhaps sell it), ultimately to end up just buying a system on the market today. You still have to remember that AT MOST, we're talking about a market (in it's entirety) is maybe hundreds of units per year...certainly not thousands.

Fun for hobby and DIY projects (certainly doable), but still quite difficult for anyone to make much of a real business case out of from a long term point of view....and for it (whatever that is) to be a real product that folks will adopt and ultimately pay money for, it'll need to be something more than that; which is the old chicken and egg problem all over again! :)

What has happened to many folks is that they come up with something neat, then find out that the customer support in this business will bury you quickly...so they have something that is becomes too big to be a hobby/part time, but not big enough to support as a job. There are dozens upon dozens of said examples out there of this happening.

I don't know the answer at all, but I do agree that leveraging current COTS stuff is a start - and I do see some of the mfgr's now dipping their toes in.

Cheers,
Stein
 
Snowflake said:
This is *exactly* why I think we should be leveraging the consumer market as much as possible. The screens on modern tablets make every EFIS on the market look like a 1980's video game. It's almost embarassing.
Click to expand...

How does the brightness of the tablet screens compare to that of EFISs? My impression is that the EFIS screens are much brighter. How hard is it to add a brighter backlight to a consumer screen? Is this practical?
 
Kevin, you've hit on one of those "market scale" issues. While it is possible to get a brighter screen, to do so at the resolutions of tablets and the PPI numbers they achieve you increase both cost and power requirements. The recent "fruit" phone was expected to have sapphire glass. People wondered why it didn't. It turns out the harder glass would have lowered light transmission. To compensate, the device would have needed to drive the display with more power. For the target market, it was not a worthy trade-off.

A search of "sunlight readable displays" yields resolutions common to our moder EFIS displays, not what consumers are demanding in their mobile devices.
 
In 15 years, when our "panels" are projected on our eyes by GoogleGlass Version 23.4, this thread will look as quaint as a discussion of ice boxes. :D

That said, in the interim, I am VERY happy with my GRT Horizon HXr. :cool:
 
Newer but not cheaper

scard said:
What do you think the usable lifespan of your installed EFIS and it's associated system components is?
Click to expand...

Scott, Like you I work in IT. I really doubt a lot of this hardware will last too long when compared to military/certified equipment. I fully expect replacement parts will be an issue inside 5-8 years as most are using consumer technology within. Quite a few EFIS manufacturers have come and gone already.

In contrast Garmin released the GNS 430 in 1998. That's 15 years of stability, support and service on those units. The units themselves are known for being reliable. I'd suggest that is as good as it gets and perhaps gives Garmin the edge if long-term supportability is a consideration in people's purchasing decisions.

All that said I don't think the lifespan of the EFIS is really the issue. Many (most?) owners are making regular upgrades as the technology improves. In 5 years I have done one upgrade already to my AFS unit. In that time we have had bigger screens, SV, charts, touch screens, the list goes on.

The EFIS has built in obsolescence as new tech and software features are released. Honestly, when all this is considered I doubt that EFIS screens are really cheaper than the gyro's they replaced. But I would never go back.
 
Well, one might wonder where the longevity of certified equipment comes from, and why the experimental avionics can't have it too.

Is it just the certification process and requirements, or is there something else? Also is the demand there for something that lasts that long in the experimental market, where upgrade paths are much easier?

How to build high-quality, long lasting avionics is known. You don't actually have to certify the product, but maybe develop it as if you were, just skip the FAA part of the process. I don't actually know how much of said processes the Dynons and AFS' of this world go through ... do they do DO-254 style environmental testing for example? even if only in part? How much would it cost if they did?

But then, do we really need a Dynon EFIS to last 20-30 years like our good old King radios and Garmin GNS'? Probably not, everyone will have upgraded to something better/newer long before then (in the experimental world).

So it only needs to last long enough until the next generation probably. And by all accounts this seems to be the case with existing products, plenty of D10's still around, right?

Of course over 30 years you may end up spending as much as you would've on a certified product that lasts that long, but you will have had incremental upgrades along the way and greater flexibility ... which is still a win!
 
Kevin Horton said:
How does the brightness of the tablet screens compare to that of EFISs? My impression is that the EFIS screens are much brighter. How hard is it to add a brighter backlight to a consumer screen? Is this practical?
Click to expand...
Brightness is a good thing to bring up... Most tablets i've seen that have "auto" brightness turned on run a lot dimmer than the EFIS screens from Dynon/GRT. However, turning off "auto" and cranking the brightness to "full" does bring them pretty close. Battery life suffers, but that shouldn't be an issue when you have ship's power to run them from.

A bigger issue perhaps is that even with ship's power, and the best charger you can find, the 2A supply sometimes isn't enough to keep up with full brightness, full-time GPS, and full-time moving map processing. At least, my Nexus 7 seems to slowly draw the battery down over the course of a flight. Wouldn't be an issue on flights less than 4 hours long, by my estimate, but still worth considering.
 
rwtalbot said:
In contrast Garmin released the GNS 430 in 1998. That's 15 years of stability, support and service on those units. The units themselves are known for being reliable. I'd suggest that is as good as it gets and perhaps gives Garmin the edge if long-term supportability is a consideration in people's purchasing decisions.
Click to expand...

While Garmin released the 430 in 1998, they discontinued it in 2006 when they upgraded to the 430W. This was not a drop in replacement. They then discontinued the 430W in 2011 when they released the GNS series of products. While you can still get support for most of these products, the Garmin service page says "The GNS 430 28V only is no longer able to be repaired." So it's not like the GNS series is an example of a product that went unchanged and sold for 15 years.

Not knocking them at all for that, since the GNS products were pretty revolutionary and clearly are good products. Just pointing out that it's not a great example of a product that has had complete stability for 15 years. Garmin has only been selling aviation GPS units for 20 years, and their support site is full of "no longer supported" products.

Along side that, Dynon has been shipping the D10A since 2004, so it's been for sale for more than 10 years. You can still get a new one, you can still get service, and we have no plans of discontinuing it. That's actually a two years longer than Garmin ever sold a specific model of the GNS products. Dynon's SkyView has been sold for 5 years now, so in just a few years it will beat the original 430 in sales timeframe. It was designed from day one to be a platform for a decade or more, with specific design choices made to allow us to avoid issues that will inevitably happen when parts go end of life, which has already happened multiple times, but has not prevented us from selling the exact same functionality. It in fact works a lot like some of the requests in this thread seem to call out- it's expandable by adding modules to the system, but the rest of the system and the screens don't need to be replaced to do so.

This isn't about experimental vs. certified. You can find companies in experimental aviation that give excellent long term support on their products and don't change platforms every few years

--Ian Jordan
Dynon Avionics
 
kamikaze said:
I don't actually know how much of said processes the Dynons and AFS' of this world go through ... do they do DO-254 style environmental testing for example? even if only in part?
Click to expand...

I assume you mean DO-160 testing. DO-254 is a design process for "complex hardware" like CPLD's and FPGAs, a lot like DO-178 is for software. DO-160 is the environmental testing.

Dynon does do the vast majority of DO-160 testing on our products, and in fact has more stringent requirements than DO-160 in some areas as we've found that to be needed to be commercially viable in our market.
 
Yes sorry I meant 160 ...

Good to know ... I'd expect environmental "sturdiness" is a big component of long life ... if you're designed to withstand temperature, shock, vibration, humidity, etc... to those levels, you're likely to last a pretty long life ...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top