Peter wrote:

"Dave J" wrote


Aviation used to represent the cutting edge in human factors research.
What happened?


I think that anybody with more than half a brain departed the GA
avionics business at least 20 years ago.

If you were seriously smart, would you work for a company that makes
stuff using 1980s technology (colour LCDs aside) and brings out a new
product once every 10 years? No company that does that will retain
good people. To top it, they blame it on certification; it doesn't
take 10 years to certify a product... especially if the company is
already loaded with competent paper-pushers.

The manner in which a GPS approach is flown with an IFR GPS should be
far simpler.


Avionics for GA is a tough business to begin with. You've got a very
limited market to begin with: only a few thousand new planes per year on
a good year, with only a chance that the manufacturer will select your
gear, and a retrofit market that isn't all that much bigger. What is it
about 200,000 aircraft total. Of those, a few percent will upgrade
their avionics in a given year. Say by some miracle, you catch 20% of
the market, that's still only 40000 units and once you sell those units,
those aircraft won't be upgrading again for probably at least 10 years.
that means, only a couple thousand units per year sales. It is hard
to spread out the production and design costs enough to make the unit
affordable enough for folks to buy it and yet profitable enough for the
business to break even or (gasp) make a profit. That, folks is the real
problem. Fixing it requires either a lot more people buying airplanes
(don't hold your breath for that), or having the avionics boxes have
some other higher volume market that can share much of the development
(eg. boating and automotive GPS supports our aviation GPS by using a
common platform).