After seeing and hearing this week about the crap that a manufacturer has to go through for even a minor change in equipment/parts, I am truly not surprised. Not at all.
The regulatory system is broken.
In the time it takes to get a piece of equipment certified, the "standards" for interfacing can become obsolete - so there is no point in a manufacturer using anything but proprietary.
The president of an aircraft company this week told me that the cost of the regulatory QA process for every part they ship is over $150 - and that is the "minimum" cost. If they even ship a $1.00 plastic door latch handle, they're bound by the process and the cost (i.e. the cost to them for the handle is $151).... and that process is in addition to the process that an outside vendor must take. Tire, spark plug, etc. all the same. Not even including insurance costs.
The process an airplane manufacturer must follow to make a simple change in avionics at the customers request is astounding. The plane must be manufactured with the equipment specified in the original FAA approvals, then it has to go to a shop where the original equipment is removed and the customer requested equipment is installed. 337's are required as appropriate.
And it's going to get worse. We talked about my prop issue. At the conclusion of that discussion, he told me that one FAA office was trying to nail a guy to the wall for not complying with the provisions of a service instruction.... the service instruction was mentioned in the POH/AFM for the plane, and if all the conditions in the service instruction were not complied with the POH/AFM was invalid, and therefore the plane was unairworthy.
The more this stuff happens, the more I think we'll all be flying experimentals at some point.
BTW, there is a lot of suspicion out there that the airlines are pushing some of this stuff to get flivvers out of the air.
