A Boeing 777 will have navigational gear as good as a Huawei phone… in 2025

by philg

“FAA to Let Airlines Seek to Delay Navigation Upgrades” is a Wall Street Journal story on how the FAA is going to allow airlines to wait until 2025 to install ADS-B equipment. ADS-B requires a GPS receiver comparable to what is found in consumer electronics devices retailing for less than $100. It also requires a radio to transmit GPS location out to the Air Traffic Control computers. The whole thing can be done for $699 for experimental airplanes (Flying magazine). How much does complying with regulation and FAA certification add to the cost when a transport-category aircraft is involved? This article estimates up to $700,000 to retrofit an older airliner and as little as $130,000 during production of a new airliner.

8 thoughts on “A Boeing 777 will have navigational gear as good as a Huawei phone… in 2025”

  1. According to the article, the $700 unit is the same as a $2,500 unit sans certification, so certification only increase the cost factor by 4 and not 1,000. The other 996x must be the obscene profit and bloat that stems from being in a worldwide duopoly.

  2. Your assumption would make sense, Izzie, if airliners and light aircraft were certified according to the same regulations. However, if you check 14 CFR you’ll see that Boeings and Airbuses are not covered by FAR 23. They have their own world of regulation (FAR 25; “Transport Category Airplanes”).

  3. Ships have been doing this for years with the AIS. Broadcasting the gps position, speed, course, rate of turn etc is requirement for most cargo and passenger vessels. It’s a cheap system as you point out, which dramatically improves safety of navigation. I don’t understand why aviation is so far behind on this..

  4. Boeing’s average net margin over the last decade is 4.8%. Airbus’s is 1.8%. Far from obscene, both of those are below the average of US corporations, Airbus’s notably so (I realize Airbus isn’t a US corporation, but I don’t know the global average).

    It turns out that despite having a global duopoly on large commercial aircraft, the two companies have largely competed away the potential excess profits. In addition, developing new jets is extremely difficult and risky, and the companies historically have been too optimistic when pricing the aircraft and/or estimating the costs to develop them.

  5. Just as a working approximation, if going from unregulated to FAR 23 raises costs by a factor of 4, wouldn’t you expect that going from FAR 23 to FAR 25 would raise costs by a further factor of approximately 4? Mostly everything Part 25 has to be built with redundancy so that would double the cost and then you double the cost again because you have to do it without doubling the weight. Now we only up to $10,000, leaving at least another 13x unexplained.

    Another way is to look at jets that are under and over the 12,500 lb./10 seat FAR 25 cutoff – for example a Citation Mustang ($2.7 million for 5 seats) vs a Citation CJ4 ($8.7 million for 10 seats). And there are even economies of scale (110 seat Bombardier CS100 for $62 million). So clearly there is a premium associated with FAR 25 compliance but not orders of magnitude.

  6. TSO’s are part 21.

    You can’t compare the cost of the transceiver with the cost of an integrated system. Even the experimental pilot is going to have to buy some additional equipment and take some time to install everything and make sure it works.

    That $500k-$700k covers a bunch of union guys installing a lot of wire, a power supply, an electronic display, an antenna, replacing some existing things to make room for it all and then doing a lot of testing. The difference between the $300k-$400k for a still in production plane says that figuring out how to do it is worth $200k-$300k.

    Which isn’t to say everything aviation isn’t over priced.

  7. What is the difference in safety performance between aircraft regulated under FAR 23 and those regulated under FAR 25?

Comments are closed.