To give general aviation aircraft owners an incentive to meet the FAA’s ADS-B Out mandate, the Aircraft Electronics Association awarded five aircraft owners with $1,000 toward an ADS-B compliant upgrade during the Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture in Oshkosh.
This is the second consecutive year the AEA has made the award available to five aircraft owners at AirVenture.
The five $1,000 winners are:
- Kevin Robbins of Horseheads, New York;
- Robert Lupelow of White Bear Lake, Minnesota;
- Linda Stewart of Brandon, Vermont;
- Lorna Hawley of Maricopa, Arizona; and
- Walter Thilly of Towson, Maryland.
Hundreds of aircraft owners visited the AEA’s AirVenture booth at Oshkosh to register for a chance to win one of the awards. Each winner must use an AEA-member avionics shop to complete the installation, which must be scheduled no later than Aug. 1, 2016.
“The avionics repair shop industry in the U.S. has only 53 months remaining to equip the entire general aviation fleet of more than 100,000 aircraft with ADS-B Out equipment,” said AEA President Paula Derks. “Aircraft owners who wait to equip will face scheduling pressure and higher installation costs as we get closer to the deadline. By awarding $1,000 to five different aircraft owners to help them become compliant sooner rather than later, the AEA hopes to send a message to owners of general aviation aircraft that the time to act and upgrade is now.”
Wow. 5 GA pilots now get to spend ~$4000 or more of their own money, to buy an already obsolete poorly functioning FAA mis-engineered overspecified ADS system, then tear up their aircraft to install it, only to find that it won’t do what they think it will do, …as the global C-N-S requirements are substantially rewritten after the NextGen redesign which is inevitable after FAA is split up in the fall. What a windfall!!! Not to mention that there are still probably about 150,000 more aircraft, not even counting DoD and foreign aircraft operating to the US, that will just wait to see what happens in the next few years, as this completely unnecessary FAA induced overpriced and conceptually flawed technical mess of an ADS-B soap opera plays out.