How long should your EFIS last?

How long should your EFIS last?

I have been flying my -7A for 3 years. It now has 325 hrs. on it, no aerobatics have been flown with it and 90% of the time is straight and level, cross-county flying. Yesterday, my Blue Mountain, EFIS Lite would not get past the startup phase. Today, Greg at Blue Mountain, in a rather matter-of-fact, cut and dried manner, simply said,"Sounds like your EFIS is dead." No offer to send it in, we'll check it over or anything. No comment like, "You should get better performance than that." Nothing.

After sending Blue Mountain $3000 when I purchased it, I now have an unusable brick. That equates to $9.25/hr. for an EFIS unit. I know things don't last forever, but jeez, that's a pretty steep maintenance price to pay for instrumentation.

So, now I'm EFIS shopping and Blue Mountain isn't in the running. What's the lifespan of a Dynon unit or a Grand Rapids unit? Any practical experience or opinions appreciated,

Mike

Not sure how long the Dynon's last but I know they last longer than that. Call Dynon up and tell them the same story about your mythical Dynon and see what they say. You may just end up buying a real Dynon.

D10A and a D100

Rv 7a that is wrung out every time I fly...In 300 hours not one failure..But then that RV is not an unlimited aerobatic machine either..

Frank

We have 620 hours on our plane and more hours on the Dynon D10 as its on more than the engine, so I would say 300 hours is aa rare failure.

EFIS on Boeings and airbus's go a lot longer than that and yes they are different but not that much.

They should be able to repair it easily...... or if not buy a Dynon!

Cheers
from Downunder

David

alcladrv said:

So, now I'm EFIS shopping and Blue Mountain isn't in the running. What's the lifespan of a Dynon unit or a Grand Rapids unit? Any practical experience or opinions appreciated,

Mike

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You now know one of the reasons I'm considering GRT or AFS for my RV. Both companies have good customer support.

Too many stories such as yours have turned me off on Blue Mountain.

Life span should be the life of your RV. With that said, electronic components are known to fail, so any vendor's product could be subject to Murphy's Law.

If the unit fails due to reasons other than neglect or abuse, any good vendor will repair it for a reasonable fee and/or allow a trade-in for a current unit.

I remember our conversation a bit differently: You indicated the EFIS was working and then stopped for reasons unknown. We kicked it around for a bit, and you then indicated that you "somehow" got into the BIOS setup for the machine and now it won't boot up.

Sounds like you Bricked it, for sure. I DID offer and suggest that you send it in and we'll take a look, but I can't possibly guess what's wrong with it. They generally don't just die of their own accord ...

Send it in and we'll fix it. Just like I said on the phone yesterday. Sorry you feel like it's irreparable, but I have no way of knowing what was done to a non-responsive machine without looking at it to see. Once you get into the system setup screens "by pushing F1 through F4 to try and make it do something" all bets are off.

We take a lot of hits for poor customer service, and we're trying VERY hard to combat that simply by providing GOOD customer service. Send it to me and we'll fix it. I can't tell what happened over the phone, but it sounds like you may have hit a key and got it in a non-usable state.

Hmmmm.....the 'other side' of the 'story' .

Yup....Blue Mountain got some 'bad press' a couple of years ago from an unhappy customer or two. It only takes ONE GUY to slam one of these companies over the internet and the downward spiral begins. That said....my experience with BM was VERY POSITIVE.......I had an RV with a Blue Mountain EFIS/EIS package and I can't say enough about Greg and the gang at Blue Mountain. I was a second owner of the package but that didn't stop them from helping me any way they could. They wouldn't even let me hang up the phone until they made sure that I had all the answers and made sure that I knew I had an open line if I needed any assistance whatsoever. Truth is....all the info I needed was provided in the well documented manuals....if I would have read them a little more thoroughly my questions would have been answered .

I'd buy from them in a heartbeat.

Greg Richter said:

I remember our conversation a bit differently: You indicated the EFIS was working and then stopped for reasons unknown. We kicked it around for a bit, and you then indicated that you "somehow" got into the BIOS setup for the machine and now it won't boot up.

Sounds like you Bricked it, for sure. I DID offer and suggest that you send it in and we'll take a look, but I can't possibly guess what's wrong with it. They generally don't just die of their own accord ...

Send it in and we'll fix it. Just like I said on the phone yesterday. Sorry you feel like it's irreparable, but I have no way of knowing what was done to a non-responsive machine without looking at it to see. Once you get into the system setup screens "by pushing F1 through F4 to try and make it do something" all bets are off.

We take a lot of hits for poor customer service, and we're trying VERY hard to combat that simply by providing GOOD customer service. Send it to me and we'll fix it. I can't tell what happened over the phone, but it sounds like you may have hit a key and got it in a non-usable state.

Click to expand...

alcladrv said:

How long should your EFIS last?

Click to expand...

Our oldest known Ultra EFIS has over 2000 hours on and is now around 5-6 years old. There are some of our Extremes which have flown around the World in open cockpit aircraft collecting countless hours and they are still in regular use. One of our Ultras was recovered from the bottom of a lake. We were the last to expect this to still work. We cleaned it up and applied power - everything worked just the way it should. Amazing.

Having said this, yes, EFIS systems do fail and ours are no exception.

From 7 years of experience in the business and around 20.000 electronic instruments manufactured (which must count for something) I can state with absolute conviction that most failures occur when the instrument is new. Very new. Usualy when you first install it and somehow get the red and black wire confused. That causes smoke to escape. You then send the thing back to us and we put the smoke back in and that is about all there is to it.

Once installed and everything is sorted out - these things go on near forever.

The electroncs industry has a term for this. It is called the "bathtub" failure curve. A new electronic gadget has a high chance of failure. This rapidly improves and then settles to a "noise level" How low this level is is dependent on three factors: The quality of the design, quality of components and the amount of components. This indirectly means the more sophisticated the EFIS, the more components, the higher the noise level.

At this point of low noise level the system will remain stable for a long time. The biggest dangers are now failures caused by environmental effects - corrosion for lack of a better word.

Then after several years (hopefully a lot of years) the failure rate starts to increase again as age of components starts to eat into their reliability. Did you know that certain processors have limited life times ? It's little known and often completely ignored but true nevertheless.

To answer your question in more depth, one should expect from an EFIS manufacturer that your instrument will be repaired in a timely manner regardless of cause and at reasonable cost (if applicable). I think most EFIS manufacturers will fit into this category. Yes, I know. Some don't.

If it is not possible to repair (for example a vital part is no longer available - don't laugh - this happens a lot), then there should be a way out, perhaps a cheap upgrade to the next instrument.

Finally, after many years, repair may be uneconomical or simply not a good idea as better and perhaps cheaper EFIS's will be around. Even our own instruments will be dynosours in a few years time. That's the way things go.
You may want to fit a new state of the art EFIS at that point, even if just to keep your panel modern and updated and by that keep the value of your aircraft where it belongs.

Rainier
CEO MGL Avionics

burn in

if they make it through the first 8 hrs they should last a looooong time.

I've been a bit curious about the hardware used in some of these. If you decide not to fix it, send me a PM. I'm interested in buying a dead one to take apart.

GRT

I dunno about the other companies, but my GRT XM receiver died last week. I sent it back to them on wednesday, they fixed it on thursday, and I got it back on friday... no charge.

Greg Richter said:

I remember our conversation a bit differently: You indicated the EFIS was working and then stopped for reasons unknown. We kicked it around for a bit, and you then indicated that you "somehow" got into the BIOS setup for the machine and now it won't boot up.

Sounds like you Bricked it, for sure. I DID offer and suggest that you send it in and we'll take a look, but I can't possibly guess what's wrong with it. They generally don't just die of their own accord ...

Send it in and we'll fix it. Just like I said on the phone yesterday. Sorry you feel like it's irreparable, but I have no way of knowing what was done to a non-responsive machine without looking at it to see. Once you get into the system setup screens "by pushing F1 through F4 to try and make it do something" all bets are off.

We take a lot of hits for poor customer service, and we're trying VERY hard to combat that simply by providing GOOD customer service. Send it to me and we'll fix it. I can't tell what happened over the phone, but it sounds like you may have hit a key and got it in a non-usable state.

Click to expand...

The unit has a long history of lockups while in operation. It was in your shop in February 2008 for that reason. A unit that worked 3 hours ago and was shutdown normally, and then is turned on after engine start but now stops initializing just past the pretty Blue Mountain logo isn't operating correctly. Who screws around with a properly functioning unit? I sure don't.

After I told you I turned it on and off a couple dozen times with the same result, you're the one that said it was dead. All this was before any other action on my part. I was trying tell you it at least got as far as it did and didn't appear completely dead.

I guess others can judge the responsiveness of customer support that takes 5 to 6 hours to respond to a call to support.

I'll take you up on your offer to send it in, of course, at my expense.

We try very hard to return tech support calls the same day and generally do. If there's a few folks that need help, or people in the shop (like today) it may be later in the day, but it's almost always the SAME day. Same hour is, I think, unrealistic.

So now the end of the story:

Mike showed up at the airport and we fixed it for him. The BIOS _had_ been set to boot from a USB Stick (which is doesn't have) and a few other things got moved around, but otherwise the machine was fine.

Could happen from voltage spikes, bad luck, evil spirits, keyboard input or enemy action, but no way to tell and it doesn't matter. We fixed it, reloaded current software, put a new database on it, ran a pitot/static check (since we opened the case) and drove him back to the airport.

We checked it thoroughly, looked at the airplane, and made suggestions for additional cooling air. Nice looking RV, but it would benefit from some air behind the panel to keep things cool. It's something people don't always leave provision for, but cooling air is good, cheap way to insure long-lived electronics.

I still don't think Mike's exactly happy with us, and even less thrilled that we charged him to fix his EFIS (that's the hardest my car door's been slammed in a while) but mission accomplished and EFIS/Lite back flying. He reported 300 hours trouble-free, I hope he gets a thousand more.

PM me for details if you want the other side.