Aspen Avionics

Mike Studley and the team have been extremely helpful in providing guidance and quality avionics to general aviation and commercial aviation with and about their Electronic Flight Display system. Truly a team effort, but Mike has personally taken the time to ensure my panel is able to provide the in flight data needed for my IFR needs. Mike has also been an easy source for my avionics shop as well to ensure the Pro Max upgrade installation went smoothly. Pilots and instructors who have used my system have been impressed with it’s capabilities, efficiency, redundancy and safety. There is too much praise to extol on this system to briefly explain in this review. Thank you Aspen for a job well done.

I recently downloaded the Chart updates from Seattle Avionics (12/30/21) for my Aspen MAX units in my Piper PA30. Upon boot up, all units displayed the revision date of the charts as ##-##-##, and the Chart screens continuously read “initializing”. For the last several days I’ve tried to reach out to Seattle Avionics to find out the problem with their recent download. No one answers the phone, nor returns calls or emails. Bottom line, the Aspen units are WORTHLESS if you can’t load the Micro Sim memory chips. Jeppesen works fine, but I now wonder if Seattle Avionics has gone out of business. 4 April 2023 update Still having the same issues with Seattle Avionics. Took 6 hours to download last night, with over 350 files that had to “retry”. Although the Computer button was GREEN, and I loaded the micro chips, they all failed in the Aspen units. Until Aspen can find a reliable company to supply data updates to their units, I would look elsewhere for glass panel upgrades!

I want to relay a serious safety concern for those aircraft owners that are described in the latest round of ads as "legacy" unit customers. The ads essentially say that upgrading to the MAX unit is "Simple and Affordable". ​The Aspen Pro 1000 was the top-of-the line product for IFR installations for YEARS. ​THIS IS IMPORTANT: Every 'Legacy' unit (before the MAX) has a single point of failure that is devastating to your safety in IFR conditions. LOSS OF PITOT pressure will result in loss of ATTITUDE, HEADING, TURN RATE, and COURSE DEVIATION, and of course, AIRSPEED. Aspen has now told me that they produced approximately 20,000 of these legacy units befor the 'Max' production started. This is like a vacuum pump failure on steroids! Forget about what the IFH and all those test questions told you about the indications from loss of pitot pressure. This can result from birdstrike, icing, insect ingestion, insect nest, breakage of brittle plastic or rubber tubing, or from accidentally leaving the pitot cover on. By chance, did Aspen or your avionics shop tell you about this total loss of functionality with a blocked airspeed tube? I am an ATP-rated pilot and a A&P with IA. I have flown many different EFIS equipped aircraft, but have never seen anything like this! You will not find this single point of failure with Garmin, Collins, or Honeywell/bendix/King systems. Somehow Aspen and the FAA allowed this EFIS system to approved in about 2007 with its entire function dependent on the rough matching of indicated airspeed and the unit's internal GPS-derived groundspeed. THE SOLUTION is to pay ASPEN $3000-7000 to upgrade to the MAX, when all we need is the utility provided by the latest approved AHRS core, & logic and verification software. Thousands of Aspen customers will be MUCH safer, and the features and appearance of the unit can be unchanged. If you are a "Legacy" customer (who Aspen wants to keep), please do not allow Aspen to hold your safety hostage like this. I have been complaning to them about this since 2010 to no avail. --DRB

Management needs greater supervision. Great product (if it actually works, there’s too many failures during the manufacturing process) there’s really troubling consequences and the quality dept. is nonsense… hope they fix