AOPA Pilot Magazine - February 2013 - 90

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AVIONICS

FAA-certified avionics and build them to
the same TSO standards.
“We’re taking a certified product [the
RCA2600] and reverse engineering it to
make it more user friendly,” he said of the
KMC2000. “The Experimental market
allows us the flexibility to make the kinds
of changes and improvements that our customers have been asking for.” Turner said
the KMC 2000 won’t tumble in unusual attitudes, and it will have an optional backup
battery. It will carry a retail price of about
$2,000 when it is introduced early in 2013.
RC Allen also is pursuing an FAAcertified series of instruments that aims
to bring the reliability and precision of
digital, solid-state instruments to several
new products that, when finished, will
comprise a modern representation of the
traditional six-pack instrument panel. The
RCA2600 attitude indicator is the centerpiece of that effort, and it will be followed
by a digital, LCD directional gyro with an
internal magnetometer that won’t be subject to precession like mechanical DGs.
These Experimental instruments are
far from infallible. Some components
are mass produced and not individually
evaluated with the same scrutiny that
FAA-certified parts receive. Others (such
as Dynon’s D1) depend on GPS data, so a
GPS outage can make them unreliable.
Other innovations include GPS-derived
synthetic vision, which is in FAA-certified
products and is rapidly becoming a mainstay of iPad-based electronic flight bags.
Experimental digital autopilots also could
lighten pilot workload and allow us to fly
with greater precision. And LED lights and
engine monitors are making their way into
more aircraft.
There’s a strong case to be made that
these Experimental avionics are far more
reliable (with much greater mean times
between failures) than vacuum-driven,
mechanical instruments are—or ever
could be. And if that’s the case, shouldn’t
aircraft owners and pilots be allowed to
decide for themselves whether to add them
to instrument panels in which they’re not
subtracting anything?
AOPA
EMAIL dave.hirschman@aopa.org

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90 | AOPA PILOT February 2013
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AOPA Pilot Magazine - February 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - February 2013
