This fireside chat recap is from FLYING’s “What’s Next in General Aviation” Virtual Event on Wednesday.
FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: A look at Dynon’s history and a peek into the future of the company and its growth path into certified aircraft.
DETAILS: FLYING’s Thom Patterson talks with Michael Schofield about the company’s journey from providing avionics for homebuilt and light sport aircraft to doing it for nearly 600 type-certificated airplanes.
SPEAKER: Schofield is Dynon’s director of marketing.
BIO: A lifelong aviation enthusiast, Schofield joined Dynon after reading an early magazine profile of the company that highlighted how much more affordable its EFIS-D10A was than any competition. He’s a Dynon “old-timer,” with 16-plus years at the company in roles across product management, sales, support, and marketing. A private pilot since 2006, Michael flies a SkyView HDX-equipped Glasair Sportsman that he built with other Dynonians.
KEY QUOTES FROM SCHOFIELD:
“We wanted to certify for a long time because there’s a lot of legacy aircraft that still need affordable upgrades.We couldn’t really find a path at first, you know, the traditional ‘TSO your instruments’ path really wasn’t going to work for us for our size. The FAA kept saying ‘just propose something, propose something’. We broke the ice with EAA when we certified the EFIS-D10A, which was the original, you know, 10-in-1 instrument that we’ve sold for many years. That was then the catalyst to get us on a different certification path with [the] FAA that doesn’t use that traditional TSO means of compliance.”
“What we’ve discovered is that since Skyview HDX is an integrated system that can do just about everything in the aircraft, the one thing that people really want, it really makes the sale, it really adds to the capability, the safety enhancing capabilities—and, you know, the pilot delight—is an autopilot.”
“We took panels of avionics that simply weren’t available to…low-end general aviation—and if you could get them, they would be like $100,000—and we took that and we turned that down to like 10, 20 percent of that.”
