Talking to the service department of any aviation firm about your aircraft’s repairs can be an expensive proposition. Airplanes, by their very nature, are more expensive than standard or above-average cars to maintain. While custom-built aircraft owners can save a bundle by doing their own repairs, that ability meets with a fairly solid wall of regulation when it comes to working on avionics. Per the regulations, you need to have the most current vendor publications, such as service manuals, to be able to legally work on your plane’s avionics. The availability of such manuals is scarce at best and is usually restricted to qualified avionics shops that have met exacting guidelines established by the OEM for the avionics. Those manuals that are available may not be current, which can lead to problems when troubleshooting a problem with the wrong revision manual. Worse yet, if you aren’t skilled with a soldering iron as well as in the detailed troubleshooting of complex electronics, then opening up the radios in your airplane to handle anything is really out of the question. When you combine these facts with the latest surfacemount technology that requires specific and expensive soldering and desoldering tools, most repairs aren’t within the scope, skills or abilities of the average homebuilder.
Finding Help
The good news is that there are many reputable avionics shops with trained and qualified personnel just waiting to repair your avionics. The qualified avionics professionals at these shops have an impressive amount of experience, as well as access to all the latest and greatest manuals, making them singularly qualified to repair your radios and get them to a like-new condition.
Those repairs come at a cost commensurate with the skill level of the avionics shop and its technicians. Avionics shops of late have had to contend with the loss of skilled personnel to other crafts, such as electronic manufacturers in their own areas, which have worked to siphon off some of their best talent. As a result, the going shop rate for these in-demand, skilled technicians has climbed, as the avionics shops work to keep their people working at the benches instead of somewhere else. So taking your plane into the avionics shop for work can be an expensive proposition. It’s important for you to be able to tell the avionics shop as much as you can about what’s wrong with your avionics. In taking this approach, you’ll help the avionics shop better focus in on the problem with your avionics. This will help keep costs down.
Tracking Problems
The problems with avionics can be wide and varied in cause and effect. Cabin temperature, poor ventilation, interference and intermittent signals can take a troubleshooting effort and expand it into a wallet-emptying experience. For these reasons, we ye put together this guide to help you find the problems within your avionics and then accurately report what they are to your avionics shop. With this approach, you’ll he able to keep your repair costs, downtime and frustration to a minimum.
For starters, you need to know when the problem happens. Do you have a transponder that loses power on takeoff or one that flakes out on landing? Perhaps it’s a navcom that gets complaints about readability above 125 kHz but not below it? You could even have a GPS receiver that loses contact with all the satellites at once. No matter the problem, you need to be able to describe it.
For example, if you’re flying with a Bendix/King KX 170- or 175-series radio these radios have two sets of components for generating the radio frequency output. One set is for the higher frequencies; one set is for the lower frequencies. By listening to feedback from other pilots and ATC, you can tell the avionics shop exactly which frequency or frequencies are giving you a problem. If you suspect a problem, get another pilot to follow you up and down the frequency range to find where the problem exists and where it doesn’t.
With this information, the professional technicians at the avionics shop will then be able to focus in on the problem right from the start. In contrast, the shop would have to take a more time-consuming and expensive approach to troubleshoot a radio brought in with “bad transmissions” as the reported trouble- While this may seem like a fine point, it’s not. In one approach the technician is able to use his experience to quickly validate your problem and troubleshoot it down to the defective component. In the second case, the shop tech has to start from scratch and look over the radio for problems. Let’s look at another example. In this case, an owner reports that his transponder is intermittent. Few words cause more confusion than “intermittent.” The most important question the shop will ask relates to the timing of it being intermittent. For example, does the transponder work if the temperatures in the cabin are warm but not when it’s cold? Does the transponder work in level flight but not on the ground? Does ATC complain that you aren’t squawking the right code when your transponder face says you have the correct code? All of this information seems unnecessary, however, armed with this information, your avionics shop will he able to tell what the initiating event of the problem is and can then troubleshoot hack from there. A transponder that works when it’s warm but not cold could be a bad connection, cable or internal component. A transponder that works in level flight but not on the ground may be caused by a tight harness or loose wire in the harness that’s pulled out by the way the airframe flexes on landing and slides back into contact when the plane lifts off into flight.
Perhaps the best way to think about gathering information for your avionics shop is to think of how you’d write a story. In a story, you typically cover who (which in this case will be the avionics in question), what (covers what happens to the avionics), when (explains the events around when the problem occurs), while “where” seems obvious, unless the avionics are portable and the problem only occurs in one plane. With this information in hand, your avionics technician will be able to determine why the problem is happening with the least impact on your pocketbook for their efforts.
Professional Help
For those of you who want to have the best answer to save you the most bucks when you hit the door of your avionics shop the Aircraft Electronics Association (ABA) has a really great starting point in its Pilot’s In-Flight Troubleshooting Guide. This two-page guide covers just about every aspect of troubleshooting you can imagine over a wide range of avionics that might be found in your airplane, For example, the document contains 17 different questions to isolate problems in your navcom and nine questions about how to look for problems with your transponder.
Between the two pages of the troubleshooting guide, questions cover everything from basic electrical system health to loran, GPS and weather system troubleshooting, as well as nay, com, audio panel, DME, ADF and even marker beacon receiver problems. The questions are phrased in such a way that most pilots can handle them. Experts in avionics troubleshooting developed the questions. They put this guide together in an effort to help shops save valuable time troubleshooting. This helps their customers save money.
