To help encourage owners of general aviation aircraft to meet the FAA’s ADS-B Out equipage 2020 mandate in the United States, the Aircraft Electronics Association randomly awarded five aircraft owners with $1,000 toward an ADS-B compliant upgrade during the Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture Oshkosh, July 24-30, 2017, in Wisconsin.
Hundreds of aircraft owners registered to win during the week at AEA’s AirVenture booth, according to association officials.
Each of the five winners must use an AEA-member avionics repair station to complete the installation, and the installation must be scheduled by Aug. 1, 2018.
The five winners are:
- Bradley Spatz of Gainesville, Florida;
- Tom Consbruck of Merritt Island, Florida;
- William Dumont of Cadillac, Michigan;
- David Consbruck of Sarasota, Florida; and
- Dustin McGrath of Port St. Lucie, Florida.
“The repair shop industry in the U.S. has less than 2.5 years to equip the general aviation fleet of more than 100,000 aircraft with ADS-B Out avionics,” said AEA President Paula Derks. “Aircraft owners who wait to equip will face scheduling pressure and likely higher installation costs as we get closer to the Jan. 1, 2020, 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.”
ADS-B is fundamentally a good idea, along with ADS-A and ADS-C. Both Canada and Australia have the right idea, using it a less complex form (with a logical NIC and NAC, and no need whatsoever for requiring WAAS/SBAS). A version such as that could eventually be used for air-air coordination by any vehicles from tiny drones and LSAs, to sport GA, to spacecraft, for very light weight and low cost. Making possible even portable units. But FAA’s massively overspecified, poorly designed (UAT and ADS-R) and severely flawed form of ADS-B is an unnecessarily expensive and complex complete mess. In fact will not ever significantly contribute to solving NextGen’s problems (because it still doesn’t even exchange the appropriate needed state vector information). So it is no wonder that both FAA and others are now trying to offer “Incentives” to get operators (pilots) to equip. But no amount of incentives (or even a rule) are ever going to help get high equipage rates for this foolish version of ADS-B. There’s not a prayer the deadlines are going to stick. Some airlines already have relief to 2024, foreign operators and countries are ignoring FAA’s misguided criteria direction on this, DoD will have many aircraft that do not equip, and GA’s equipage rates are so low that there is no hope of 2020 compliance in any numbers that will avoid crushing GA, if FAA sticks to its completely inappropriate deadline. Finally, if any avionic system is useful, works, and contributes to improved capability, one doesn’t need, or shouldn’t need “Incentives”, or even mandatory equipage rules, to cram it down operators throats.