I just don't understand why so many people here, and many pilots, abhor any kind of tech improvements, and rather than find solutions, look for all the reasons why something shouldn't or "can't" be done. It's not just Cirrus, but people hated glass, composites, etc.
It's this mindset that "why should you have it better?! You need to suffer as much as I did and fly IMC approaches down to minimums with nothing more than an ADF!" - it's a very peculiar and not very mature way of looking at the world, wanting yours and future generations to suffer as much as yours did
I think I literally just said this in a training thread... LOL...
Aviation is price sensitive.
In most industries, tech lowers cost while maybe making the product better.
Moving map? Great. Moving map that costs $10,000 installed? Mmmm... a harder mistress to love. Especially when that tech (from the same company even!) is so cheap it’s a commodity item in other vehicles. Even the data updates in those are “pffft... that isn’t even the price of a fancy dinner out!”
But when you’re hurtling at things inside a cloud at the MAP 200’ up... commodity grade doesn’t cut it. The question is always “just how much more does it need to be tested?”
The other thing is the sunk cost fallacy of repairing vs replacing, but it’s that low whistle you do when replacing a $500 receiver for a $10,000 one that makes you pause hard.
ADS-B is different. It adds some value but again, high price (please include the “free” ground stations and piles of back end equipment) and abysmal engineering quality (It’s pretty easy to count 15-20 known single points of failure that are UNmonitored), along with the magic word “mandate”... leads to some heartburn for anybody who knows safety system design or formal failsafe system design.
Which is the worst part of it. It’s not primary, can’t be, and won’t be, and isn’t a safety system. Not by the definition of one in engineering disciplines. It’s a best-effort system, designed close to 25 years ago.
Most people who drive cars until they die have owned two since it was state of the art.
They’re on their fourth or fifth better and cheaper laptop since then, and easily their third smartphone, let alone cell phone which was barely affordable when the ADS-B design was laid down. Hahaha
Asking much money for that now is fairly laughable but par for the course for aviation and FAA. They don’t move fast but there’s a lot to be said that they’re behind even the slowest tech adopters now by over a decade. Closer to two.
Price sensitivity includes “My ipad has done more than any of my aviation tech for over a decade and my car has for half of one...” when marketing to the raw public about flying.
They really do expect push button flying these days.
