This month’s panel for planning circles back on the dilemma many owners face when they aren’t ready to spend big on a glass upgrade. A lot of times it isn’t even really about the money, and more about utility.
That P210 you’ve been flying for years—in all kinds of weather—still has a panel full of mechanical instruments. Yeah, you’ve gotten a taste of modern glass and gee-whiz automation while riding in friends’ airplanes, but the way you see it, your bulletproof analog panel works just fine. Until it doesn’t.
Maybe a spinning remote heading gyro fails. Or the King electric HSI needs work. And what happens when the mechanical manifold pressure, fuel flow gauge and fuel quantity cluster quits? What usually happens is your shop gives you an eye-watering quote for repair, including lots of troubleshooting and removal and reinstallation labor. For any of that short list of repairs, the invoice could be more than the cost of a digital replacement instrument.
The thing is, good shops will put on their consulting hats and give you some options that compare the cost of the repair or exchange with the cost of modern retrofit replacements. “Had I known what the real cost of a modern alternative to my failed primary gyro was, I probably would have spent the money on it instead,” a reader recently told us. What he’s referring to was Garmin’s GI 275 electronic attitude instrument as a replacement for the stock vacuum-driven flight director gyro in his early-generation Piper Malibu. Instead, he paid nearly $5000 for an overhaul, including labor, shipping and third-party shop overhaul costs. It adds up quickly, plus the plane was down for three weeks.
Eyeball the interface
When faced with a gyro breakdown, look at the big picture. Attitude and directional gyros and also turn coordinators often interface directly with the autopilot system, and removing them could mean having to replace the autopilot or buying an autopilot gyro emulator if you plan to keep it.
But autopilots aside, a repair or overhaul of common attitude gyros, DGs and even basic HSIs might be cheaper than a full-up EFIS installation, but there are extra costs that can tag along with the job, and that includes shop labor. In addition to the labor to remove the instrument, ship it out for overhaul and reinstall it after the overhaul (or installing a like-exchange), the shop generally has to calibrate the outputs so it flies the autopilot true. That means putting the instrument on a gyro stand and adjusting things like command bar alignment, bank angles and pitch references, to name a few things.
But plain-vanilla attitude and directional gyros are generally a lot easier when it comes to labor, although prices aren’t getting cheaper and for some, service parts are becoming scarce. A complete overhaul on the 200-6/model 52D54 AIM autopilot directional gyro is priced all over the board, but you could spend over $2000—which is money you could put into an entry-level mini EFIS.
We’ll look at some side-by-side repair versus replacement examples in an upcoming issue of Aviation Consumer. Until then, get firm quotes for upgrade before committing to repairing any mechanical gyro and engine instrument.
