King KMD 550 - Little Airplane pointing wrong way!

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hawkman

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Mar 16, 2015
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Hawkman
Hi everyone,

I'm a 250 hr PP-ASELS with 14 hours experience with my 2001 Cessna 182T. It's a fantastic airplane but I find the King KMD 550 MFD and its associated KLN 94 GPS quite antiquated.

Pretty much all my experience with aviation GPS is with Garmin - I have a Garmin 695 in another plane, a Aera 500 that I use for primary navigation in the Cessna and D-2 on my wrist. I'm used to having lots of configuration options and I can't figure out something with the KMD 550.

The KMD 550 is connected to the traffic advisory system and the StormScope, so I do want to use it for reference but one very small and very annoying thing seems to be occurring with it: no matter which direction I am flying, the "little airplane" on the KMD 550 screen is pointed North. The map is correctly aligned "track up". Weirdly, the KMD-550 QRG manual shows the little airplane pointing the right direction.

I know this isn't a big deal but it is distracting and is inconsistent with the information on the Garmin's screen.


Is there any way to configure the orientation of this icon on the KMD 550? I've read the manual and I can't see any obvious way.

Many thanks!
 
Thanks for the reply... I'm looking at those pages in the PDF but there seem to be no figures (images) on them. What option do you select to change the orientation of the little plane icon?

*** edit ***

Just tried the PDF on a PC, for some reason many of the images don't display on Mac's Preview app. However, I'm still unclear on how to configure the orientation of the icon. Any tips?
 
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Any chance you could take a photo of what you are seeing, next flight?
My little airplane usually seems to point the way I want!
The only option I know of is track up and north up. I guess on the ground it does not see motion and will point in random directions, otherwise it seems reliable. Or its possible I dont understand what you are experiencing.
 
I posted a reply but for some reason it is being held up by a moderator. Yes, the plane has a HSI and I have spoken to my avionics technician and he thinks that the heading information from the HSI is not being correctly passed to the MFD, resulting in a couple of faults including TAS issues. What's slightly weird is that the HSI heading information is not sent as digital data - it's analog apparently.
 
hawkman said:
I posted a reply but for some reason it is being held up by a moderator. Yes, the plane has a HSI and I have spoken to my avionics technician and he thinks that the heading information from the HSI is not being correctly passed to the MFD, resulting in a couple of faults including TAS issues. What's slightly weird is that the HSI heading information is not sent as digital data - it's analog apparently.
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Your images normally won't attach until you've been here long enough to build up 5 or so posts. Give it a few more posts and try again.
 
hawkman said:
I posted a reply but for some reason it is being held up by a moderator. Yes, the plane has a HSI and I have spoken to my avionics technician and he thinks that the heading information from the HSI is not being correctly passed to the MFD, resulting in a couple of faults including TAS issues. What's slightly weird is that the HSI heading information is not sent as digital data - it's analog apparently.
Click to expand...

You may not be getting the data from the flux gate, or it may be corrupted. First thing I would try, and this is a generic go to for all flux gate devices, similar to rebooting an electronic device at first signs of problems.

Do a 720° set of turns one way transitioning directly into a 720° set of turns the other. If there is a simple fix, this may be one of them.
 
I just spoke to my avionics technician. The problem was apparently a poor connection between the HSI and the MFD, which he has fixed. He's finalizing some configuration changes with his laptop and then I'm going to test fly it tomorrow. If I see any issues, I'm going to try the 720 degree turns to see if they resolve them. Thanks for everyone's help; I'll update once I know more information.
 
hawkman said:
I just spoke to my avionics technician. The problem was apparently a poor connection between the HSI and the MFD, which he has fixed. He's finalizing some configuration changes with his laptop and then I'm going to test fly it tomorrow. If I see any issues, I'm going to try the 720 degree turns to see if they resolve them. Thanks for everyone's help; I'll update once I know more information.
Click to expand...

If there was a connection problem, that was likely it, however the turns do also function as a "maintenance" type thing to get them all rebooted and realigned every now and then. Robertson Autopilots used to recommend you do it monthly if you used a flux gate instead of a gyro.
 
Good idea, and I know exactly when I'm going to do the turns. I have a sightseeing trip this weekend which gives a good opportunity to circle around a point on the ground. Thanks for the tip.
 
OK, I've spent some time on the issue and have been given some bad news by my avionics guy: apparently the TAS (traffic) function of the system is providing bad heading data to the KMD 550. As I understand it, this system is somewhat strange in its design: there are multiple sources of heading information:

(1) The "directional gyro" (actually electronic) provides an analog signal to both the StormScope and the TAS subsystems
(2) These subsystems then interpret this and then relay their own digital data back to the KMD 550
(3) There is a priority of which subsystem is "trusted" by the KMD 550.

In my case, the TAS is providing incorrect data (it seems "stuck" on roughly 347 degrees) thus the little airplane is pointed the wrong way. GPS, DG and StormScope are all providing correct information but because there is one inconsistent input, it throws the system off.

The very very bad news about this is that it will cost $4500 to have the TAS unit serviced at Honeywell. It's a flat rate price apparently.

My question now becomes, is there any alternative to this? Is there a replacement part available for less? The unit came with my 182 when it was produced in 2001, maybe someone has swapped out this King stack for a newer Garmin platform and could sell me the TAS part?

Any help gratefully appreciated.
 
:sigh: You are about to discover the realities BK, they have basically abandoned the GA market. I gave up on BK a few years back when they screwed everyone with the Avi8or Horizon packages that were completely useless and they provided absolutely 0 support for their $5000 product.

The problem is you probably don't have any options to fix this for <$4500, and it'll be interesting to see how long it takes BK to get it back to you. I am not aware of a third party input available, perhaps someone else is, but given the small market share of the product, I'm in doubt one exists.
 
I've spoken to them on the phone and they're actually very nice and helpful. I don't think they've "given up" but for sure they seem to have pricing that is more geared to commercial operators than private pilots. I'm working with one of their technical support people right now and he's taken the time to email me personally to ask questions. Whether that saves me $4500 is another question entirely...
 
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