The breathlessly awaited Evolution EFD1000 Electronic Flight
Display system won't quite be ready to take up position in Santa's
sleigh this year... as advance word to ANN from Doug Cayne and the
rest of the folks at Aspen Avionics came in just a short while
ago.
Cayne notes Aspen shares the disappointment that such news is
likely to bring, but that the program remains "in good shape" even
though "a few things are taking longer than we'd like."
The new schedule calls for certification by the end of the First
Quarter of 2008 but Cayne explained that the new schedule gives
them more room for unforecast delays than the elder one.
Aspen has issued a customer letter to explain the matter which
is attached below.
An Open Letter to Aspen Avionics Customers
As the first day of Winter and the holidays draw near, we know
many of you are looking for news from Aspen about when our new
EFD1000 products will be certified and shipping.
Despite our best efforts, we’re not going to make our
original Fall 2007 delivery date. However, we are now at a position
far enough along in our development and certification process that
we can provide a date that we are confident in meeting. We’ve
made allowances for surprises we think are still possible, and
added further cushion to accommodate the unexpected. We can now
commit to shipping certified units by the end of the first quarter
of 2008, and have high confidence in our ability to meet this new
date. We are working with our dealers now to schedule customer
installations starting in April 2008.
The later stages of FAA certification—whether for new
avionics or for new airframes—are highly variable and hard to
predict with accuracy. Until you’re close to the end of the
process, it’s hard to tell where you’ll find issues in
testing. In the end, we should have allowed more time for the
unexpected. We believe our new schedule does.
Aspen has been working closely with the FAA on this project for
over a year now, involving them at every stage of development and
incorporating their feedback all along the way. So they and we are
in tight alignment as we wrap up this certification effort.
We will submit our final FAA certification package in time to
support shipment of EFD1000 Pilot and Pro PFDs by March 31st, 2008.
Our initial Approved Model List (AML) STC will include most Class I
and II airplanes (those under 6,000 lbs. gross weight), over 600
makes and models; Class III airplanes will require additional
certification work, and we plan to add those later in 2008. We are
working on the MFD schedule, and as it appears now we plan to ship
the MFD products by year-end 2008.
Many of you may be in the middle of planning a panel upgrade, or
even have one scheduled in the shop before April. We know how
frustrating it can be having to make a purchase decision with
inadequate information, and apologize if our inability to give you
a detailed update on our progress before now has caused you
problems. We felt it was better to hold off on an update until we
had reliable information to give you, rather than providing a
string of best guesses until we finally got it right.
We are working closely with our dealers that have placed orders,
are keeping them fully up-to-speed on our progress, and will work
with them on prioritizing early deliveries to best meet the needs
of their customers. Please keep in close touch with your avionics
dealer as you plan your EFD1000 installation. We have just released
a preliminary Installation Manual to our dealers, which can help
them prepare and perhaps pre-wire a plane for the EFD1000,
minimizing the further work required when we ship the product.
We’ll do our best to work closely with you and your dealer to
minimize the impact of this delay on any panel upgrades scheduled
between now and the end of the first quarter of 2008.
Recently, we’ve added several enhancements to our Customer
Support operation, and will be further expanding it before customer
deliveries begin. While we’re still in this
pre-certification, pre-installation development stage, we’ve
focused our engineering and support resources on finishing the
product, writing installation and pilot documentation, and helping
our dealers prepare for starting customer installations. As we get
closer to certification and deliveries, we’ll expand our
support staff so we can provide real-time support, with even better
online resources.
We encourage you to make the Aspen Avionics web site your first
stop for pre-purchase and pre-installation questions. Most of the
support questions we receive can be answered by reading the Product
and FAQ pages online. E-mail is our preferred method for other
support questions, because we can more easily route questions to
the right person. Contact us at: support@aspenavionics.com.
We have now brought all telephone support in-house, and are
doing our best to have an Aspen employee available to answer your
call live during the work day. You can now call 505-856-5034 (or
888-992-7736 toll-free) during regular US Mountain Time (UTC-07:00)
business hours and ask for Customer Support, or if you get the
Automated Voice Attendant, press option 4.
Now that we’re over the hump of major timing
uncertainties, we will post increasingly frequent and specific
updates on our web site, of which this letter is the first
installment. This web page will always have the latest news and
major milestones as we finish development, gain certification,
begin deliveries and customer installations, and ramp up production
to meet demand. Please bookmark this page (http://www.aspenavionics.com/evolutiontracking)
and check back often to track our progress.
The product has come together beautifully, and is a joy to fly.
Despite this short delay in starting deliveries, we will doubtless
have many happy pilots flying behind the EFD1000 soon. You
won’t have to wait much longer to experience the joys of
flying the EFD1000 yourself.
Best wishes for Happy Holidays,
Doug Cayne, Aspen Avionics, Inc.
VP of Marketing
Aero-TV Profiles the Aspen Evolution
Aero-News' crack team of Aero-TV 'video-gnomes' chronicled the
press conference and the enticing initial details of the Evolution
program just a few months ago at Oshkosh 2007... that video program
is attached below.
About Aero-TV: It's Just About Show
Time!!!!
OK, folks, here we go... as noted (last week) this is the
final ramp-up on the way to the full-time daily news and feature
services we'll be offering from ANN's Aero-TV Network programming.
If you've been an observer of the media and associated media
industries over the last few years, it's not hard to mistake the
fact that a massive revolution is taking place. Old sources for
news and information are falling by the wayside, having to change
their modus operandi or risk obsolescence (or extinction).
Electronic media and print media are both under the assault of
progress, and the online world has been a cornerstone for
revolutionary change.
We've been ready to go for a while, but to be honest, there's so
much more to this program than we've alluded to, and a lot more to
learn from it than we can relate without spending hours (literally)
doing so. We've been building and planning a massive new
organization within ANN, we're hiring talented new people as fast
as we can find them (a far more difficult task than we
had imagined -- REALLY good people are hard to find), and we're
brainstorming at speeds that would make a deorbiting Space Shuttle
feel like a slug. Suffice it to say that we want to do this right,
rather than right-now, and that the development of this program has
been the most carefully pursued undertaking we've ever undertaken,
even without the additional complications presented by getting
clobbered by a BIG bounced check and even greater losses from the
Columbia bankruptcy (where we got left holding the bag for tens of
thousands of dollars), as well as the innate complexities of such
an aggressive programming addition.
So; the Aero-TV program starts ramping up... right now. We've
been editing and finishing production on the better part of 100 new
Aero-TV features and are chomping at the bit to show you ALL that
we can do... through the initial Three Phase deployment (yeah, this
project is THAT big) of Aero-TV and an all new ANN. Through the end
of the year, we'll be presenting at least one new program each
week, in addition to other programs that may have aired previously,
in order to make sure that you all get a chance to see what we can
do and offer up your comments and suggestions on our
programming.
E-I-C Note: The complete Aspen Avionics
Evolution feature is embedded in this story, above, with most
of the slick and useful functionality otherwise available on the
main Aero-TV site. The ability to embed a
video on another web page is but one of the hundreds of
amazing little features that we've worked hard on, for many months
now, to implement in different phases of the initial release
of Aero-TV. It is, BY NO MEANS, the only way to enjoy unaltered
Aero-TV programming on other parts of the web... as we have
aggressive plans for future functionality, but this feature allows
those with an interest in a specific Aero-TV News or Feature
program to embed it on a different web site, though we must
note that we reserve the right to forbid such use for those sites
or purposes that we do not feel fit in with the proper mission of
the Aero-News Network, Inc.
Webmasters or Administrators of well-trafficked aviation or
aerospace related sites, are wlecome to contact the Publisher to
start conversations on how they may be able to leverage some of the
immense power of Aero-TV programming for their sites and
constituency by clicking the I Want My
Aero-TV! link.
Classic Aero-TV: The Switchblade Flying Car FLIES!
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