According to a recent poll conducted by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, more than 58% of survey respondents indicated that they would install ADS-B equipment prior to the Jan. 1, 2020, deadline mandated by the FAA.
In addition. 3.7% planned to equip in the next six months, and another 8.7% plan to equip in the next year.
Less than 15% indicated they never planned to equip because they don’t fly in airspace where it’s required, while nearly 15% said they had already equipped to meet the mandate.
The association noted that the results from the poll questions do not necessarily represent the views of pilots, aircraft owners or AOPA members and therefore should not be used for research purposes.
How about you? When do you plan to equip? Join the conversation in the comments below.
31 December 2019
When the FAA permits the manf’s of said equipment to offer it for sale at both a price point and installation fee that is not over regulated. I just experienced the ultimate in FAA red tape. I changed a business from an Scorp to an LLC and needed to get the aircraft registration changed. The amount of paper work for this is horrendous. It was rejected once because I was missing some piece of infomration. IT was rejected again becuase in the box where you must sign your name, I failed to PRINT MY NAME below. Why, becuase the instructions, so tedious, are on a different page. OK FAA I AM AN IDIOT.
I believe that, in general, if ya want to fly up there with the big boys you may have to pay the price, equipment-wise.
Unfortunately, many tech-savvy pilots are explaining that the entire ADS-B system is so flawed that the touted safety benefits are largely illusory. If that is true, then ADS-B becomes an entertaining but attention-diverting toy (“Oh look at the screen! There’s an aircraft 7 miles behind and 2,500 ft above me!”), and yet another tool useful to Homeland Security’s quest to monitor every movement within or near the USA.
Fortunately, I live in the sticks and can avoid Mode C transponder airspace altogether. The 2020 mandate will simply prevent me from continuing to make occasional trips to Mode C Veil airports. And if my lack of equipment targets me for a Homeland Security SWAT-team encounter at a podunk airport, I will park my plane, shake my head and slowly walk away from personal aviation for good.
I’m not currently planning on equipping with ADS-B out. I never fly in class B or C airspace, or over 12,000 ft msl. All of my destination airports are in class D or E airspace. ADS-B out provides no benefit to me as a pilot .
In Central and Northern California it is easy to fly around all of the class B and C airspace .
A question that no one has been able to answer is; can I still use VFR flight following with just a mode C transponder, as I do now ?
I will wait to install 6 months before the deadline.
As time goes on, the cost is becoming less and less, the units are becoming more compact and as with anything else, manufacturers will be competing to offer the most bang for the buck as time goes on.
When ADSB was first available, the projected cost was $10K. At the moment, I’ve seen as low as $3k along with designs that use little space and less difficult to install.
I won’t be the first kid on the block to get ADSB, but when it all shakes out, I will have the most affordable and reliable ADSB setup available all because I waited for it.
If I install the equipment at all it will be very late in the game. I am fortunate in that where I fly in the Pacific Northwest about 90% of the flying I do can be done in airspace where equipage is not required. I may have to modify my habits a bit, but that is a smaller price to pay than the equipment itself.
I am not just unhappy about the price of the equipment, but the installation thereof as well. If someone would come out with a single do everything box to replace my transponder that I can install myself, I might be tempted to giver ‘er a whirl.
The perceived benefit of traffic display can be accomplished for far less money through many of the currently available, inexpensive, though non-compliant, portable devices. I can mount an iPad to my panel attached to a portable ADS-B receiver and get the same benefit for much less money, and I can move it form airplane to airplane.
Also, I am a bit concerned with all these new gee-whiz TV screens that people put in their airplanes that have them head-down in the cockpit instead of looking out the window. I have had to take evasive action to avoid traffic that never moved, almost as if they never saw me.
Fortunately out here we are blessed with good visibility most days. Generally “poor visibility” out here means you can only see 50 miles (feels kinda claustrophobic). I prefer to rely on the MKI eyeball and head on a swivel.
I have already equipped and it is awesome. I have a Garmin 430W with a GDL 88 and seeing traffic targets on the moving map on the Garmin is great. What amazes me is how much traffic I never saw before this. The airspace in the Northeast can get quite congested and see and avoid has limitations. Having traffic displayed on my panel has forced me to improve my scan abilities as I look for traffic that is painted on the screen but very hard to see outside. On one recent flight I saw converging traffic at my 2 O’clock position on the Garmin that was 500 above but descending. I could not see it because it was above a thin scattered layer, but knowing it was there gave me ample time to plan. I calculated that at its rate of decent that we would converge at the same altitude by the time it crossed my flight path so I started a gradual climb to put myself 500 above the target at the point of convergence. I saw the traffic when it was less than a mile away, but instead of soiling my underwear from a surprise near miss I saw the traffic exactly where I expected it to be.
True that cost of equipage is rather high and it would be nice if there were cheaper paths to equip, but it was still far cheaper than existing TAS/CAS solutions and the level of safety it provides is well worth the cost. Sure it’s not perfect, but improvements will come over time and the more pilots who equip, the more of an installed base there will be to support improvements.
Some choose to complain about that “Dang Gobment takin’ away my rights”, but I prefer to be a part of the solution.
Having more and better traffic information is undoubtedly helpful. And one may feel some sense of being satisfied at having spent the price of a G430W and GDL88. But having done that will not be so satisfying when the pilot finds that critical airplanes and UAVs aren’t seen, or other aircraft, or UAVs, or gliders or parachutists or military aircraft … each that do not see your aircraft, and then run you down, because of the flawed FAA ADS-B and ADS-R concept, with profoundly conceptually erroneous or crippled aspects like ADS-R, …and that GA aircraft owners are going to need to spend more money all over again, because FAA’s NextGen design is severely broken, and isn’t going to work at all as they advertise. Just simply having some users having a severely handicapped ADS part of the CNS triad, and still having no RNP based trajectory exchange via data link to implement an efficient and cost effective separation process, isn’t going to work. NextGen does NOT equal ADS-B. The FAA’s system is essentially falsely built around the horrendously obsolete and failing ADS-B concept of still “hand carrying” airplanes via “pseudo radar”. That is so horrendously inefficient, obsolete, and dysfunctional that no one in low end GA or UAVs will ever be able to afford to fly in mixed airspace when fully allocated costs are eventually charged. So equipping with ADS-B now, even if it were $500 per unit, or free, does nothing but act as a pacifier and placebo, beyond getting some marginal traffic improvement over TIS-A of a decade ago (e.g., with a G430 NON-WAAS and GTX330). So FAA’s version of ADS-B is nothing but a false security blanket and wasted money at this point. ADS could be vastly better, cheaper, and easier to equip if it allowed for a revised NIC and NAC, and ADS could be safely using ANY GPS. It could even have been made small, light, and portable, and be on the tiniest of UAVs, for under $500, had the FAA not entirely and totally screwed it up with incorrect overblown specifications, that in the end, won’t even work to solve NextGen. So at this point, FAA’s version of ADS-B isn’t worth spending a dime on it yet.
I have a transponder with mode C. Recently had to waste $625 to repair it. It provides nothing to me and is a cost I have to pay to exercise my right to fly. When I can buy a box to replace that box and pay in the area of $900-1,500 I will equip with ADS-B. If my cost ceiling cannot be met I will quit flying my plane for anything but fun and will not go into areas the government has taken away from me. Prices will come down on the equipment in the next 4.5 years if it does not I just won’t buy it.
Excellent reply John. I and many other GA pilots feel the same way as you. For ADS-B to work, and be useful, it needs to be small, light, low power, and at the low end, for low cost air vehicles, be portable, and be at most $500 to $1000, …for a device that can see ALL other ADS-B reporting traffic, including small UAVs and gliders, as well as King Airs, B777s, and F-18s,… and NOT by needing FAA’s poorly conceived and limited coverage ADS-R that will never be deployed globally.
See if your dealer is a offering the FreeFlight Systems Ranger Lite ADS-B Out unit. Without GPS it is under $2,000.
I will equip with ADS-B (or ADS-C) if and ONLY when it is properly designed to support Nextgen (which it is not presently so designed now), and when ADS-B will actually facilitate and yield useful operator benefits, and when ADS-B will support critical “fully allocated cost” reductions for ATS services for a properly configured CNS capability, AND when ADS becomes economic to install for ALL shared airspace users (including the full range from tiny UAVs, to parachutists, to balloons, to LSAs, to gliders, to sport GA, to BizAv, to air transport, to security and special purpose (e.g., MEDevac and fire suppression), to military, to international Ops).
Present ADS-B does NONE of these critical functions well, and for most users is still completely dysfunctional, and outrageously expensive, for little or no benefit to the users (for example, since not even all aircraft can see each other due to completely inappropriate and globally unique mixes of UAT and ADS-R with Mode S based ADS and FANS equipped aircraft)
So the truthful answer to the present question being posed in the title is (if FAA doesn’t first completely re-specify ADS-B to correct a seriously flawed NIC and NAC, and re-design NextGen to actually work and provide user benefits),… is NEVER !!! I ( and many others) will NEVER equip with FAA’s still seriously over-specified and flawed (non globally relevant) version of ADS-B, even if it were give to us for free.