China’s latest piece of uncontrolled space junk hit the Pacific Ocean 620 miles off Acapulco in the Pacific Ocean on Friday, but the most serious impact was on the other side of the world. Spain briefly closed large areas of its airspace on Friday morning when a Chinese booster rocket used to propel a section of the country’s space station began breaking up in the atmosphere, according to simpleflying.com.
Good atrticle, Paul. Garmin is, indeed, an interesting company that has taken on several “Goliaths” and walked away the winner. To me, they have a lot in common with Apple, but for a more diverse group of customers. Both are single-minded in innovation and coming up with the next indispensable product. Their victory over Bendix-King is a tour de force of how the senior company developed corporate sclerosis while the more nimble upstart outmaneuvered them at every turn. B-K is now basically a seller of rebranded products from other companies. To me, their one big mistake was to not build the GTN line (650 & 750) plug and play with the GNS series. That gave Avidyne an intro by making their 440 and 540 line direct replacements for the aging GNS units. My personal preference is that the Avidyne boxes are more user friendly than the GTN series, but that is just me. Garmin makes excellent and reliable products and deserves to be the big dog in avionics. It is hard to imagine anyone ever replacing them, but then, that is probably how Bendix-King felt in the early '90s.
Garmin is just another exemplar of American tech success. Young, hungry and agile they out competed the complacent sclerotic, bureaucratic behemoth that was Bendix King.
The reality is they are now the industry behemoth with lots of young, hungry, and agile competitors like UAvionics.
I remember reading an article in the early 2000’s from a Garmin engineer. He laughed at King, saying that after living on the success of the KX 155 for 20 years they were about to get their ass handed to them by the GNS 430.
Yes congratulations but with some reservations.
Garmin has a reputation with aircraft installers as sidelining equipment much earlier that necessary. Planed obsolescence if you will. That also works for Apple.
My GPS NAV is now not supported by Garmin or Jeppesen. I could survive on once yearly database updates as an light ac IFR pilot, but no, thats it, good bye.
For a VFR flyer, Garmin’s competition in avionics is the device I’m posting from. Installed avionics are one of the few things that make an Apple product look like a bargain.
Steam gages and a recent iProduct for SA (or droid if so inclined) cut out the more expensive forced obsolescence, database updates and arcane GUIs. While you can argue about the last one, no one can question that having the GUI available to poke around in (including planning and flying with the same device whenever/wherever) makes GUI self-training much more natural/pervasive. Don’t get me started on the Vegas style avionics color explosion or tapes for no good reason…nominal indication should be monochrome and needles aligned, and all tapes full range. Save the color for where it highlights a change…a little more consistent human factors over marketing pretty would help all.
Any of the above, and the ability to xref terrain databases for vertical nav, access external weather/traffic data in a graphical display puts Uncle Sam’s finest in my career to shame, but that has yet to convince me that spending my engine reserve on avionics provides any extra utility for VFR…but the folks competing there represent the innovation that will invade Garmin’s profitable general population market.
I have an old ancient Magellan hand held GPS that I use as a backup unit when I fly. In addition to the Garmin that’s panel mounted. Magellan gives me the very basic information, takes longer to load, and occasionally freezes. The Garmin rarely ever glitches. But I always carry a backup just in case.
Garmin shares one trait that always bugged me about the relatively stone-age Jeppesen subscription … the trailing cost of updates. The thing is/was, the data is/was always complete and always there. The user might have to look for some essential nugget, but they can/could rely on its accuracy. Lives depend on that.
Garmin puts out some innovative products but the cost is excessive for their aviation products. Basically the same hardware sells for marine use at 1/4 the price. I recently saw a midget mustang with the Dynon screens. Having recently flown a friends plane with the latest Garmin screens I must say the Dynon presentation is much easier to use.
The cost should have gone down. These units are no more complex or capable then Ipads. It is all in the software. Sadly GA manufacturers are slowly killing all segments except EAB with costs.
To be fair, the EAB equipment doesn’t have to go for expensive TSO testing. The Garmin G5 started life in the EAB world, and that version is still cheaper than the Part-23 version of it even though they’re the same product.
I like the Garmin products, especially if you stick with the brand because they all just work together. But it would be nice to see some actual competition in the market, and if anyone could do it, I think Dynon could.
Great article. Garmin did one other thing that was smart. When someone else displayed talent for engineering and looked like competition, Garmin bought them.
I flew behind an Apollo CNX-80 for quite a while. A very capable IFR navigator, the first one certified with WAAS and LPV capability. Coupled with the MX-20 multi-function display it was a heck of a product. Garmin bought the company, and instead of shutting them down made good use of their engineering expertise in it’s own product line. The engineers were kept in place (Garmin AT is still in Salem, Oregon) Garmin’s G600 hardware looked suspiciously like two MX-20s turned sideways and boxed up side by side.
Garmin is not doing so well in the Part 25 world. Honeywell and Collins are entrenched in that market. Some corporate pilots that have used the G-5000 have commented that it is too much like a Cessna 182.
I doubt a Garmin FMS will ever make it into a Boeing or Le Bus.
What Garmin did to King et al is comparable to, and occurred as, Cirrus’ dismantling of Cessna’s gasoline-powered empire.
It’s hard to predict when an asteroid will strike.
If you all remember, part of what also harmed BK was high prices. They ‘had’ the market so they could do what they pleased and sat on their laurels vs inventing new lines. Along comes youthful Garmin with a better product – in some cases a revolutionary new product like the GNS and G1000 – and just totally gobbled up the market before B-K knew what hit them. If you think back to the late 90’s era lines of airplanes filled with Silver crown one year and suddenly filled with Garmin stuff, it happened in the blink of just a few years.
I think Garmin better be careful that they don’t go down the same rabbit hole with prices or planned obsolesce, too. One wrong move and Dynon or uAvionix could do the same thing to them. One innovative product could infuse capital into those companies and they’d be off and running. In fact, I’m eyeing new functions for my airplane and will be paying close attention to stuff offered by those companies.
Airventure 2022 will be interesting. IF MOSAIC does what we all hope it will, it could be another game changer. As Yars says above … ‘an asteroid’ still could strike.
Of course a couple of major items that you left out are that a large majority of the legacy early GPS/ Nav/Com radio companies got their start from Art Collins of Collins radio. There was King Radio and around the same time there was Wulfsberg radio both in Kansas and around the same time there was Global Navigation in Tucson who BTW got their big push by designing some products for King Radio and then when Global Nav merged with Wulfsberg radio in Prescott Arizona they bacame GWS, (Global Wulfsberg Systems). At Embrey Riddle university in Prescott Arizona there is a photo of Art Collins, Ed King and Paul Wulfsberg, the 3 of them working side by side at Collins radio designing early Nav and Com radios. The Paul Wulfsberg merger which started Global-Wulfsberg in the mid 1980’s in Prescott Arizona then became Global-Wulfsberg-Systems who actually had a working GPS for high end Business jets prior to Garmin and of course prior to GPS GWS also had their hand in loran C. And then you mention IIMorrow but you forget that before II Morrow they were Morrow who made SSB HF Marine radios for the Alaskan fishing fleet and they were the original local boys and girls here in Salem Or. who eventually became Garmin AT. After the Morrow marriage fell apart they became IIMorrow after a bad breakup that I won’t get into and of course then IIMorrow became UPS-AT. And eventually UPS-AT was saved from the hands of of the wicked Brown boys in panel trucks by the grace of Garmin. I had the fortune to work for every one of these companies starting with Wulfsberg radio in Prescott then becoming Global-Wulfsberg then Global-Wulfsberg-Sundstrand-Data control then Global-Wulfsberg-Allied-Signal then briefly GWS Allied-Signal-King radio then coming home to Arizona again with Chelton-Cobham/Wulfsberg radio then doing a full 360 and finding myself back to my Kansas roots back at Garmin AT. As you see the world of American avionics has its roots in almost every one of these early companies that you mention but one thing in common with every one of them is that most if not all of them got started by Art Collins.
And of course Garmin did not kill King radio either, it was the hands of Allied Signal and the penny pinching of Allied that eventually killed us at King Radio. While I only worked for the Allied/King/Wulfsberg radio division in Olathe for 2 years whereas I was at Wulfsberg radio for over 22 years, it was during the time frame when Allied Signal came in and totally decimated King Radio/Global-Wulfsberg-systems and all of their other holdings and this was my first hand experience at who truly destroyed King radio.
I thought that Paul’s article was quite good. But I agree with you that the lack of investment in new product development, after the Allied Signal acquisition, was the beginning of the death spiral for King Radio. Allied was more interested in immediate profits back to the parent. As a footnote, Gary Burrell was the Engineering VP at King Radio when I was there… small world.
When Allied Signal merged and moved Global-Wulfsberg to Olathe from Prescott AZ, all that they wanted from the merger was the Global navigation line of GNS GPS navigators and no engineers. They just wanted to get their hands on Global’s GNS/FMS navigator lines which is not to be confused with the Garmin GNS lines either as Global also had a line of high end FMS/Navigators named with various GNS designators. Allied never tried to understand that Global Wulfsberg was an old company with many employees who had deep roots in Prescott Az. Many of these engineers for instance who worked in the tactical FM/AM radio division also had spouses and children who worked on the Global Navigation side and vice versa. Unfortunately; Allied signal/King Radio never attempted to know their new Global-Wulfsberg-Systems employees and as a result a significant amount of RF talent was tossed by the wayside in Olathe Kansas in the late 1990s early 2000’s and this RF talent field then found itself at other Companies especially after a brief move back to Arizona after which they were once more mistreated when Cobham Avionics in the UK did the exact same thing that Allied did to what remained of more than 30 plus years of RF talent, hence a significant amount of RF engineers of all ages found themselves at the better company.
Garmin earned the business by providing more for potential customers, more often.
One does not ‘take’ a business, there is no ‘share’ of a market. http://www.moralindividualism.com/monopol3.htm.
It managed to invest in more and new products. That suggests good selling and good financial management.
Another early user friendly navigator was the Northstar, quite popular, but IIRC the company did not do much more. Eventually purchased by Canadian Marconi who made doppler navigators, FMS navigators and earlier Omega (a long gone long-range system).
Keep in mind that ‘Bendix/King’ is really the remains of King Radio company, who the AlliedSignal empire took over and put it with their Bendix radio lines.
King Radio was started by Ed King when Collins Radio would not invest in developing for the less-costly-than-airliners market.
King progressed to be a solid supplier of radios to the airline market, at much lower cost than Collins radios, with very good product support more efficiently than Collins.
Unfortunately King did not find its way to competing for the B767 market which had a new generation of avionics. PW and I’ll bet AC wanted King.
Then along came Gary and Min, as you relate, doing what King had done - better products. Congratulations to them!