Avidyne’s Dan Schwinn has been flying a lot over the past couple of years, testing new equipment and features on various products created by the avionics manufacturer he founded in 1994. From his perch leading the company, Schwinn has observed the market forces at work in recent months, in terms of supply chain and ongoing pandemic woes, which he addressed in a press briefing at EAA AirVenture at Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
“Even the biggest avionics manufacturers are small consumers of electronic components,” said Schwinn, and what happened over the past year had a serious impact. “The very large users of silicone—primarily cell phones, and computers and so forth—ended up using a lot of it, all of the capacity that’s available. So smaller companies ended up not being able to get our allocations. We’re having to go find supply on the spot market for components.”
