Dynon Skyview Freezes on takeoff

I have Dynon touchscreen monitor and complete setup. Have about 80 hours on the plane and electronics. On takeoff roll, hear a loud hum in my ear. Look at screen and it was completely frozen. Too late to abort takeoff. Thank God it was at my local airport under perfect conditions. Tried to reset unit in flight without success. Glad I am experienced enough to fly the plane without any objective data on board. Could be a real issue for new pilot.

Sending the unit back for evaluation. It is still under warranty but this episode really concerns me. Anyone else ever had Dynon system malfunction in flight??

"Search" is your friend!

http://www.vansairforce.com/community/showthread.php?t=125056
Active discussion on Skyview in-flight failures.

Well, just in case anyone is interested, Dynon called with my final diagnosis. The Skyview had a bad memory stick in the RAM memory. "Premature failure of the system hardware," is the official diagnosis. Covered by 100% warranty, but doesn't make me feel super confident with using one electronic brain for everything in my plane.

I had read others have reported Dynon doesn't admit fault. In my case, they said it absolutely had nothing to do with anything I did.

jtppalmer050390 said:

Covered by 100% warranty, but doesn't make me feel super confident with using one electronic brain for everything in my plane.

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Exactly. Hence having triple redundancy in any critical electronic piece of equipment, regardless of manufacturer, is a smart idea.

Had the GPS in the main unit go bad in mine. Shipped back to Dynon, they found nothing wrong but it still did not work. Friend with similar sky view allowed my to try his unit in my install and it worked fine.
Dynon then replaced unit by return mail and now works fine. It was a multi phone email several week process but they eventually made it right.

It is so important to be able to fly the airplane by feel alone for this reason. Steam gauge asi's can fail too. Some instructors teach this, some don't. It isn't that hard to fly and land safely without instruments. Everyone should be taught how.

We had a guy up here with a commercial license loose his airspeed indicator in a C172 and he declared an emergency and landed on a busy highway rather than just continuing straight and level and flying back to the airport. Everyone had a good laugh at his expense but I think it was just a gaping hole in his training. He just didn't know any better because he was not trained how to fly attitude and he thought he was in grave danger.

If you have no redundancy in your airplane then DON'T count on the instruments, EFIS or steam, to keep you safe. If it was designed and installed by humans, it will fail. Flying by attitude is easy to do and it instills confidence. Sorry if this is OT.

Scott makes a good point, however many of these are failing with very few hours on them. That means a brand new plane with a pilot that is perhaps very unfamiliar could be at moderate risk. With so many failing, has there been any findings as to why? I've read memory issues...does that mean a bad batch, bad assembly or bad design? Is this being handled by waiting for units to fail or is there some sort of service bulletin or recall? If it's a bad batch of something, can't it be narrowed down to units purchased within set dates or a series of serial numbers?

ColoRv said:

Scott makes a good point, however many of these are failing with very few hours on them. That means a brand new plane with a pilot that is perhaps very unfamiliar could be at moderate risk. With so many failing, has there been any findings as to why? I've read memory issues...does that mean a bad batch, bad assembly or bad design? Is this being handled by waiting for units to fail or is there some sort of service bulletin or recall? If it's a bad batch of something, can't it be narrowed down to units purchased within set dates or a series of serial numbers?

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I don't know that it's "many" failures. And if it's due to a memory chip failure, then that has to be traced back to the manufacturer of the chip (identifying whether a certain die lot has a higher-than-normal failure rate and why, etc.).

I received my upgraded SV touchscreen and it had serial number 12000-something. That's a lot of units sold, for GA, so a handful of failures is probably not "many", but certainly worth Dynon investigating root cause.

FWIW, I've had the following failures of equipment, all from different manufacturers, within the first 200 hours (and all repaired or replaced at no charge by the vendor):

SV1000 (they had a batch with boards that were not cleaned properly during manufacture by the supplier; R&R'd as part of a SB in less than a week)
GNS-430W - GPS card failed
XPDR (Dynon rebranded Trig) - replaced at no charge, has worked flawlessly since
Alternator (VR failed in such a weird way that it was *always on*, and I only found it because my lighted switch is lit iff the alternator is on...so it was lit even when in the Off position)

None of these were due to installation or wiring errors...they were ALL defects in the product. Infant mortality? Perhaps. But it does point out the need for vigilance, redundancy and fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants ability (as well as knowing your systems and always leaving yourself an "out").

Ive got 17 hrs in phase 1. I think my next flight will include some practice not looking at the screen or at least trying to guess my airspeed. But i do have an app on my phone that will tell me my ground speed, that could come in handy landing.

MikeyDale said:

Ive got 17 hrs in phase 1. I think my next flight will include some practice not looking at the screen or at least trying to guess my airspeed. But i do have an app on my phone that will tell me my ground speed, that could come in handy landing.

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I find that I tend to land better with no airspeed indicator, just by looking at the sight picture. I don't know why that is. Perhaps I am more focused on judging attitude and sink rate? Dunno. My instructor had this soap holder thing with suction cups that he would put over the ASI. He would pull it off at 50 ft and lo and behold if the sight picture out the window was right the airspeed would usually be bang in too. If you couldn't manage it he would not let you solo, byt after a couple of tries it was no problem.

When I took delivery of my factory built RV-12 I received instruction from the Van's employee who delivered it. Jose Gutierrez, a CFI. After about four landings when on downwind he turned the dimmer for the Garmin G3X so that the screen was totally dark, saying "OK, I showed you the proper attitude. Now land it." There are NO backup gauges for this eventuality. The landing turned out fine and it was an excellent lesson.

My instructor regularly blocked the speed and altitude on in the steam gauge C172 while being in the patter on both day and night VFR flights. I thought it was standard training procedure.

When doing transition RV-7 training (in a few years.....), I will specifically request for the same. Paying a couple of extra $ sounds like a good investment to me.

EFIS is great but.......

The new EFIS panels are so great but these malfunctions can and obviously do happen all the time and to no fault of the manufacturer or builder at times.

My panell has a Steam gauge, Airspeed and a seperate turn and bank coordinator, as well i am installing an overpriced(i coudnt believe the cost of this plastic thing.... talk about gouging) AirGizmo panel receptacle for my separately powered Bendix King AV80R.

The above should give me all the redundancy needed as i will fly this plane in night VFR.

I was trained to fly by seat of the pants and pretty much do, however, it is nice to line up on final and be comforted at a glance to the left that you are on target with airspeed as it has so much to do with a safe landing.

Oh and by the way, in my plane there is ALWAYS a pencil and a map, both have never needed batteries, satellites, or wiring. Just saying! LOL

Given the concern that someone mentioned with units failing early on (infant mortality problems often being a major mode of failure for electronics), is anyone doing "burn in" or extended ground run testing? For as long as it takes to build most panels, it seems it would be relatively easy to wire stuff up on a bench with a timer on the power circuit to simulate many power cycles interspersed with several - hour runs.

Do any experimental avionics manufacturers recommend this, or have any supported such a practice?

If you are looking to do a lifecycle test, you're going to need the vibration and heat cycles of an aircraft as well. Bench testing alone means practically nothing. Lessons learned in a former life in electronics R&D.

ColoRv said:

If you are looking to do a lifecycle test, you're going to need the vibration and heat cycles of an aircraft as well. Bench testing alone means practically nothing. Lessons learned in a former life in electronics R&D.

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I'm not thinking to do a full lifecycle test, just run the units through enough power cycles to simulate the effects of a few dozen hours of operation. Few of us would have the resources to do the real testing. The goal is more to uncover true "infant mortality" failures rather than to simulate the effects of real world operation.

As an FYI, every SkyView is run through 48 hours of temperature and power cycles before it ships. They are turned on and off hundreds of times.

So, Skyview made it back (and a day early). Plugged it back up and had it auto detect all the installed components. Headed straight to runway 35 and was back in the air. Worked great and literally took less than 5 minutes to reinstall and have back in operation. The Dynon system is awesome. Hope I have many more hours of operation from it.

ColoRv said:

Scott makes a good point, however many of these are failing with very few hours on them. That means a brand new plane with a pilot that is perhaps very unfamiliar could be at moderate risk. With so many failing, has there been any findings as to why? I've read memory issues...does that mean a bad batch, bad assembly or bad design? Is this being handled by waiting for units to fail or is there some sort of service bulletin or recall? If it's a bad batch of something, can't it be narrowed down to units purchased within set dates or a series of serial numbers?

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About 2 years ago, I went to go buy a Garmin 795. Managed to "break" every one that Spruce and Banyan had for sale. OK, I didn't actually break them all, its just that a bad batch of them had come out. You would take it out in the bright sunlight, and the screen would almost instantly freeze. After about 10 or 15 minutes back inside a building, they would be OK again---until the next sun light exposure. Had Garmin scratching their heads on that one for awhile.

(They finally fixed it)