On Tue, 03 Oct 2006 14:13:40 +0000, John Theune wrote:

To clarify my earlier post: Go ahead and blame Garmin ( which may or may
not be right ) but don't use this failure as a reason not to have advanced
avionics in aircraft.

I don't know about that. An inability to build proper reliability into a
system would sound to me like a good reason to avoid it.

More, I've been thinking about the statement "it rebooted". There really
shouldn't be an "it" in an airplane, should there? There should be a
"they", right? And the statement should have been "one of them rebooted".

There are two screens for redundancy, but only one system?

With respect to the sensor providing bad data: sensors can provide bad
data. They break. Part of the job of the unit accepting input from the
sensor is to flag such failures. This isn't an "odd case"; it should be
one of the tasked requirements.

All that said, I'm uncomfortable with some of the symptoms described. Why
would the AHRS have a problem because of a bad fuel sensor? How would
fuel contaminate a pitot tube (in my 182s, they're not positioned such
that this could occur)?

My first thought is that there's some problem particular to this unit that
was being flown. Failing that, I wonder what else in the environment
might have triggered the multiple failures.

- Andrew