National Aircraft Finance Company (NAFCO) and Pilot Bank have launched a new financing offering to provide unsecured loans up to $35,000 for general aviation pilots to upgrade their avionics to meet the ADS-B mandate.
NAFCO and Pilot Bank partnered with the NextGen GA Fund to support pilots who are facing upgrades required by FAA mandates that will require all aircraft flying within the most congested airspace to have ADS-B Out by 2020.
NAFCO’s ability to provide unsecured installment loans for avionics upgrades will not replace their standard financing for upgrades exceeding $35,000, but will simply offer another option for GA pilots, company officials noted.
Again, perhaps a laudable nobly motivated attempt, but a meaningless counterproductive avionics equipage step. FAA’s ADS-B doesn’t stand a chance of being implemented as planned, or surviving globally for the long term, and is unlikely to even stand successful implementation by 2020.
FAA’s ADS-B is entirely the wrong form of ADS to be investing in. It won’t properly work to solve Nextgen. It can’t see all aircraft yet, it can’t see UAVs, airlines are not even going to equip with it yet (they are likely to get a deviation until at least 2026, if not forever), foreign operators and airlines will just thumb their nose at FAA, FAA’s inappropriate ADS-B uses inappropriate criteria like DO-260B with completely inappropriate NIC and NAC requiring using obsolete unnecessarily expensive WAAS for low end users (instead of just using any GPS or Galileo etc), FAA’s ADS-B requires a profoundly conceptually flawed ADS-R, and it doesn’t even yet do the needed RNP based trajectory exchanges needed for all vehicles, for any hope of a successful, affordable, functioning NextGen, So now having pilots or operators even taking out a loan (up to $35,000.00 no less) just to buy another FAA modern day “Edsel” (just like MLS) would be the height of both fiscal and operational irresponsibility.