AIRVENTURE 2023: A REBOUNDING AVIONICS MARKET
When I started going to the big show at Oshkosh (it wasn’t called AirVenture back then) somewhere around 1990, Northstar, Magellan, II Morrow and King were among the most recognizable names in the avionics market. And pilots flocked to Oshkosh for smoking deals on Lorans, handheld GPS units and of course portable radios. Avionics shops and mail order houses loaded their trucks with inventory knowing that showgoers would bring wads of cash to blow on the year’s hottest gadgets. I miss that excitement, but it’s just a different market.
Still, from the perch at Aviation Consumer, my focus at the big show is always on the products, and more recently the health of the avionics supply chain—which was on life support at last year’s show. While not entirely out of the woods, vendors I talked with this year had more normal heart rates. For those who played the right cards and didn’t choke along with the supply, it’s back to delivering fresh new products, or at least getting back to building them. Dynon Avionics finally finished its next-gen small-screen D30 EFIS, adding a long-awaited newer backup for the HDX suite. The electronic component shortages hit Dynon especially hard, but all indications are that it fought its way back to near normal.
Garmin’s Jim Alpiser told me the company’s most wanted gear is flowing to the dealer network. It even had a new product—the GHA 15—proving that radar altimeters haven’t died forever. But the flagship announcement was the first retrofit Autoland and Autothrottle system. These days I’m too jaded to be awed by avionics. But flying shotgun with Garmin’s Jessica Koss in the company’s B200 King Air—the first Autoland interface in a twin and on the G1000 NXi—my eyes were even wider than they were when flying behind a pre-certification Autoland in a Piper turboprop back in 2019. Smooth, precise and one heck of an engineering feat when you consider the deep interface between the engines, avionics and airframe. Yeah, I’d say Garmin’s holding down that prestigious Collier Trophy. What’s next? Autoland for the piston market I assume, and that’ll bring Autothrottle, too.
For something that’s a lot simpler to pull off, a big surprise came from the Honeywell exhibit with a $5200 drop-in replacement for the venerable KX155/165 VHF radio. Yes, the KX200 is many years late to the party, but perhaps not too late for owners struggling to keep their failing KX155s working without wanting to spend thousands to repair a 1990s-vintage rig. There are a lot of KX155s and if the wiring is good, I think for some a KX200 replacement could make sense—perhaps more so for lower budgets that can’t handle a teardown installation. Going bigger, Honeywell has been racking up flight test hours with its Anthem integrated and scalable avionics suite intended for a broad market segment. It flew its Pilatus test bed into the show with a functional—although very preproduction—Anthem as proof.
Over at the Cirrus metropolis, the big news was a hot new weather radar system for the Vision Jet. It’s Garmin’s GWX 8000 and it’s hands-down the most sophisticated and automated ship’s radar we’ve seen for GA applications, and in the Vision Jet the goal is to make it easier than ever to use in the heat of battle—especially for step-up pilots who’ve never used radar. We’ve sure come a long way from the days of the venerable Bendix RDR160. Check out our AirVenture Diary report in this issue for more AirVenture standouts. If AirVenture 2023 is any gauge, I flew far away from that hot and crowded show cautiously optimistic that the market is nursing itself back into decent shape. —Larry Anglisano
