ADS-B Installs: They’re Getting Noticeable

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I’m pretty sure Florida pilots have a slightly different relationship with thunderstorms than do pilots in other regions. We get so many of them, especially between March and December, that they often don’t impact flying much. Last week, Sarasota Avionic’s Dan Gulandri and I launched in his Bonanza with the western horizon black and threatening. My radar app showed the storm was going to sweep across the airport in a few minutes and probably park for a while. And that’s exactly what it did. Big deal.

Dan needed to calibrate his new Aspen AoA system and needed some help and I needed to do some screen recordings for this ADS-B video. Perfect day for it, actually. Enough weather around to make it interesting and a surprising volume of local traffic to test the iLevil.

It could be my imagination, but since the last time I flew an ADS-B system, which was last spring, I was seeing a lot more 1090 extended squitter targets in small airplanes. Last time, most of the ES traffic was airliners, which use Mode S exclusively for Out compliance. That suggests to me ADS-B equipage is picking up.

I think lots of buyers are still gaming the calendar on this, figuring there will be more price breaks on the equipment. There have been some, to be sure. Aviation Consumer does a periodic buyer’s guide on ADS-B and we noticed that without actually announcing it, L-3 has lowered prices on some of their gear marginally since early summer. I wouldn’t be surprised to see other manufacturers do the same, but I’m also not expecting the dramatic breakthrough that would knock the cost of entry down to, say $2000. Considering installation and paperwork, mandate-compliant ADS-B Out is still going to cost between $4000 and $5000 and up. If I had an airplane I planned to fly in mandated airspace, I’d probably equip it now or sometime during the next year. Some owners won’t fly in the airspace where ADS-B is required and will likely skip the installation and a few cantankerous types won’t equip as a protest vote. Be my guest and good luck with that. I’m sure you’ll move the FAA to reconsider.

The benefits of having full-boat ADS-B appear worth the cost of entry to me, even though I’m not as hard over about anti-collision capability as some pilots are. The fact is, as more airplanes equip, the better the system works at making all the traffic visible to the largest number of users. I’m thinking here of owners flying with portables who won’t see all the traffic because they lack the Out signal and thus don’t get the full traffic package from the ground stations. But with other participating airplanes nearby, even portables will see more targets. Just don’t count on seeing all of them.

FIS-B weather is the larger benefit, in my view, as it was when we were flying last week. As expected, the storm—a convective rain shower with some red bits in it—parked over the airport and moved slowly east. But the FIS-B radar was fresh enough that we could see that the north end of the airport was clearing off and we could end run around it by flying a few miles offshore over the Gulf. In days of yore, such an offshore run would have been a crapshoot, since there was no way to know how far the weather extended. With FIS-B radar, it’s child’s play to negotiate showers while having a good feel for the intensity. Do that three or four times a year and the system—portable or installed—will have earned its keep.

I don’t see any benefits in waiting much longer. Even though I have a sneaking suspicion the FAA may slip the equipage deadline, it’s not going to disappear entirely nor is the equipment going to get much cheaper. Just having the weather data alone strikes me as well worth the package cost.

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