WaiexN143NM wrote:Hi all,
Jonathan, thanks for the detailed good explanation. My disappointment with navworx made me walk away from this for a day, i was going to write a similiar post. Navworx is living in fantasy land. This whole fiasco could have been easily avoided. If the internal gps on a couple of models was/is within acceptable tolerance, then a request to change the sil code to the faa could have been made. The FAA folks are not going to forget any of this. Any resolution, or any new products will now be slowballed, pushed to the corner of the desk, or forgotten about. Shutting the door in the face of the inspectors twice has not earned them any respect. And the FAA is not going to give them any. Incredible. Im wondering if i have a $1300 paperweight.
WaiexN143NM
Michael
Retired FAA
I tried to keep my initial post as matter-of-fact as I could. Now that it's not my initial post...
I agree that Navworx is in the wrong here. They had to address the fact that hardware they already sold was non-compliant with the mandate (i.e. the SIL) and instead of trying to work with the FAA to resolve it, they simply took the easy way out and flipped a few bits in the ADS-B packet to make the problem go away. The very bits which say "this is a high-precision, high-reliability GPS source that can be trusted for life-or-death decisions." When called on it, they doubled-down and pulled a "think of the customers!" while placing their customers directly in the line of fire.
[Edit/New Para]: Their press release is extremely telling. If they had the data they claim they do, they would have provided it to FAA before we got this far. So either the FAA rejected it (which I'm sure they would have spun in their press release) or they simply didn't provide it. The FAA inspector tried to access their facility (as he has legal authority under the TSO) on three separate
prearranged times and was turned away each time. I can't fathom a situation where this makes sense and their press release doesn't even try.
This feels like Ameri-King all over again.
Because I didn't want to deal with this whole multiple unit/multiple antenna nonsense, I was planning to just stick a Garmin GTX 345 (or some
variant thereof) in the aircraft. Sure it costs more, but it seems to sidestep a huge number of these problems. While I have yet to execute on the decision, it seems like the better decision every day.
Attempt #2 at this whole Sonex Business.
Waiex-B WXB0019 [Progress reported upon completion]