19 December 2007
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: .
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,
