The Start of Another Exciting Flying Season!

This blog entry can also be found at Avidyne Live.

I am a newbie to flying and the aviation culture, but I’ve been around long enough to know that spring weather (actually summer like weather here in the Northeast) means it is time to kick off the air show season.  We are in the middle of a very busy two week stretch that includes the Aircraft Electronics Association (AEA) meeting which is attended by the avionics sales and service groups from across the country, Aero Friedrichshafen which is a popular fly in and airshow located in Germany and Sun ‘n Fun starts next week in Florida.

These shows are always a busy time for us, and they create excitement among our employees and customers.  This year’s show season brings with it a little more optimism than we’ve had in a couple of years.  We have survived the recession and the sharp downturn in GA; we have introduced our next generation of products which have been successful in these challenging economic conditions and we are hopeful that as the economy strengthens so will the GA industry.

We have three press releases that have gone out this week covering the following topics :

• Avidyne Corporation and Extra Aircraft LLC today unveiled the Entegra Release 9 Integrated Flight Deck avionics suite for the Extra EA-500 aircraft.  Extra Aircraft is the first manufacturer to choose the innovative Entegra Release 9 suite as factory-standard equipment.
• Avidyne has partnered with RocketRoute.com to provide Eurocontrol-approved Flight Planning for the European General Aviation market and world-wide flight tracking.
• Avidyne announced two innovative new features called “FMS Preview” and “FMS Centered” for their award-winning Entegra Release 9 Integrated Flight Deck (R9) avionics system. FMS Preview allows pilots to see a graphical presentation on the split-screen map as they scroll through the list of available departures, airways, transitions, and approach procedures in the R9 Flight Management System (FMS).   FMS Centered enables pilots to scroll through their flight plan and view the entire route of flight at a single range setting on the split-map display, to get a better idea of the weather along the route. (See Attached Press Release for More Info.)

 We will have more to announce next week at Sun n Fun as well, so stay tuned.

On a personal note I will be taking my first long distance GA flight as I fly a Cessna 182 to the Sun ‘n Fun show next week.  To date the longest flight I have taken in a SEP aircraft is about two hours.  I am going to do this with my instructor, from Executive Flyers Aviation, as part of my IFR training.  Almost all of my 120 hours of flying has been in a G1000 equipped plane (except for the 30 hours I’ve logged in a Super Decathlon for basic aerobatics training, that was fun!).  My plan is to use this training time to really understand our competitor’s product, do my check ride in the aircraft, and then transition into an R9 equipped plane so I can have a solid understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each product.

I am looking forward to the trip and have received many comments on how this will be an invaluable learning experience that I wouldn’t otherwise have gotten by doing local cross country trips as part of the standard IFR syllabus.  I won’t be getting the full Sun ‘n Fun experience as we will be going into KPCM so we have easier in and out logisitics.

If you are attending Sun N Fun feel free to sign up for our customer appreciation party on Tuesday night.  This is our second annual party in which Avidyne employees throw a BBQ and get a chance to interact with our customers.  It’s pretty cool when the senior developer of our FMS is flipping burgers and talking to the R9 pilots who are flying the system with the airshow providing the backdrop.  This whole flying culture is pretty cool!