EFB Data costs

[Flyhound]

I have an old Garmin GNS 430 in my panel and it works OK for my kind of flying. The IFR data subscription for the US costs me $449/year from Garmin. I get the same basic information for my tablet for $120/year. I'm assuming the data for these products all comes from the same federal sources, so why the big difference in cost? I know my tablet is NOT to be relied on for navigation, it's just an extra reference to have in the cockpit with me. That's more a function of the hardware not being properly certified. I understand the difference between certified hardware costs and consumer product costs, but if the data packages have the same government source, why are they priced so differently? I'm thinking about replacing my old 430 with a new Avidyne 440 that will fit in the same panel tray, and the data packages for it are between the really low cost for my tablet and the higher costs for the Garmin products. Still, the data package for the Avidyne is double what I pay for updates to my tablet. I just don't get how the extra cost is justified. Can someone explain it to me?

 

[mandm]

It’s quite simple, the government or FAA’s motto is that they are for the people, yet they create rules to keep us rodents or soldiers in the hamster wheel, as the busier we are, the less time we have to use logical thought to conclude what is actually happening. There’s an excellent sales pitch that has been the same for the past 100+ years. Although I am more on the business development side or sales side of things, I really dislike false promises or overpromising, but this is frankly the norm and we reward it. Weird.

Now if you look up the Garmin CEO, you only see government issued webpages, no Wikipedia, maybe it’s out there somewhere. Interesting.

So someone at Garmin is in bed with someone at the FAA and they were having drinks at a POA fly-in one evening and said hey let’s make some more money and sell pilots insurance by creating data packs that are already free and make it required. Pilots love insurance and risk, let’s make a sales pitch out of it and charge an AMU out of it.

And there you have it, another AMU is extracted from each pilot annually.

On another note, I had a GNC300XL IFR GPS and sometimes I would input an airport and it would not be in a database, guess what, you simply input the GPS coordinates that I found on foreflight while in flight and wah lah. Works just the same….

 

[Jesse Saint]

The required data for the 430 or 440 is $299/yr. That is the USA IFR Navdata. Obstacles cost more. Charts cost more. If you have a good source for charts and obstacles, then you just need the navdata for the navigator. Garmin and Jeppesen charge the same $299 for that data. The EFB can have plates, but the IFR navdata must be on the navigator. It’s much more than airport coordinates. It’s an of the waypoints and approaches nationwide including data for RNAV glideslopes. The additional cost is because all of the charts are available digitally from the FAA. The navdata must be updated and a database built every 28 days. Plus, the market will bear the cost.

 

[nauga]

Now if you look up the Garmin CEO, you only see government issued webpages, no Wikipedia, maybe it’s out there somewhere. Interesting.

I think there's something very wrong with your computer...or your Google-fu.

Nauga,
and his top hits

 

[mandm]

Let’s continue this conversation tonight after a few drinks hahs

 

[asicer]

I think there's something very wrong with your computer...or your Google-fu.

Oh I dunno. His data seems to fit his narrative just fine.

 

[AvNavCom]

I just don't get how the extra cost is justified. Can someone explain it to me?

My guess? Liability. If you put your airplane into the ground because you used data on your tablet, they can just shrug and walk away. If that data is wrong for a certified system and the investigation shows it was contributory to a mishap, they'd be on the hook for millions. Possibly there's also some additional QA process, which might hike the price. I imagine that the price delta between experimental and certified avionics has much the same logic.

Also greed. Old fashioned greed is probably the biggest reason.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

Because they can.

You pay $449/yr for a GPS in a GA aircraft. I think we paid something like $1000/year for the G3000 in a TBM. Then, got a CJ4 and the navdata for that was $8,000/year.

The more money you have, the more money you'll be charged. Renters will pay $120/year for an EFB, but you're one of those rich owners now!

 

[Flyhound]

My guess? Liability. If you put your airplane into the ground because you used data on your tablet, they can just shrug and walk away. If that data is wrong for a certified system and the investigation shows it was contributory to a mishap, they'd be on the hook for millions. Possibly there's also some additional QA process, which might hike the price. I imagine that the price delta between experimental and certified avionics has much the same logic.

Also greed. Old fashioned greed is probably the biggest reason.

I don't think so. The data comes from the feds, it isn't generated by the bundler. Garmin or Avidyne or whoever the middle man is could shrug off the liability saying it was federal data that they relied on. I can't argue against the greed point of view though. Making more money without any intellectual or financial investment by just acting as a middleman seems to be a dominant business model. Maybe what we need is an open source navigator that gets data from a non-profit that converts the federal database into a format that the navigator can use.

 

[Flyhound]

The more money you have, the more money you'll be charged. Renters will pay $120/year for an EFB, but you're one of those rich owners now!

Well, heck, I never thought owning a 70 year old taildragger design would put me in the rich owner category. I think there is a misplaced assumption that you have to be uber rich to be a pilot, while boat owners can be your average Joe or Jane. Fixed costs for boat ownership in the PNW closely parallel boat ownership costs. Moorage for a 30' boat coast about the same as hangar rental for a 4 seat single, insurance costs are very close, and an annual haul-out costs about the same as an annual aircraft inspection. Operating costs can be similar too. Fuel cost per hour can be the same for a boat as for a plane, you just cover greater distances in the plane during that hour. That gets me to another beef I have. International border crossings in a boat don't require any advanced notice and are a non-event. Those same crossings in a small plane require prenotification, a manifest and often include obnoxious customs inspectors. All that despite the fact that you can smuggle a LOT more contraband in a boat than in an airplane. Whether the authorities are worried about smuggling people, drugs or weapons, boats can carry a LOT more than planes can. Still, boat operators are essentially treated laissez faire by the authorities. Why is that? Maybe it is time to stop flying and start boating again...

 

[midlifeflyer]

I don't know if it's liability or what but the answer may just be that it is a subscription for continued use of the avionics, particularly for IFR flight.

The nav dataset itself - waypoints, navaids, approaches and their fixes/altitudes - is from the FAA. You can actually pull it down yourself here. X-Plane users who don't care about international flight, use that file, and it's probably the reason updates to the internal Dynon database are free (even the certified Dynon HDX requires an external IFR GPS navigator)

OTOH, if you are using a Garmin or Avidyne, you are using that IFR certified GPS and a database that has been massaged and integrated to work with their IFR-certified system to produce such things as vertical profiles, +V advisory guidance, and whatever else you may think makes purchasing their hardware valuable.

 

[Bell206]

I just don't get how the extra cost is justified. Can someone explain it to me?

As I recall, Garmin and the others do not actually process the data from the FAA, and other NAAs, but buys the aeronautical data from approved data providers. Garmin, etc. in turn gets issued an FAA LOA to provide that data to each user. So basically the avionics OEM are not taking "free" data and upselling it vs buying the data from Jeppsen, etc. and adding a profit. If you dig into the Garmin site you can find a listing of the LOAs.

 

[Llewtrah381]

On another note, I had a GNC300XL IFR GPS and sometimes I would input an airport and it would not be in a database, guess what, you simply input the GPS coordinates that I found on foreflight while in flight and wah lah. Works just the same….

When was this? If in the past 10 or so years, it took two $175ish proprietary Garmin 8mb(!) data cards to download the entire US. I live in TX, and although there was overlap between the two cards, if I was headed west too far and had the East card in, I’d get that result. Not the FAA or even Garmin’s “fault”, I’d say: just the growth of RNAV approaches over (after?) the launch of that GPS 25ish years ago and the data needed to get them in the GPS. The cards are where the data resides: no card, no data. Unlike current GPSs that “mule” the data to the GPS’s internal memory. That’s why I carried 3 cards, so if a card died (and they did more times than I expected, at least the GPS wasn’t bricked. (There was a trick to getting more than one card updated off of one subscription back then). IIRC there were several subscription options: East, West, and All - not sure

 

[Llewtrah381]

OTOH, if you are using a Garmin or Avidyne, you are using that IFR certified GPS and a database that has been massaged and integrated to work with their IFR-certified system to produce such things as vertical profiles, +V advisory guidance, and whatever else you may think makes purchasing their hardware valuable.

And the FAA is accountable for the accuracy of what it did in creating the charts. Garmin, etc. are accountable/liable for connecting that map data to an accurate displaying of it on their equipment. So there’s a liability cost in there too.

 

[RussR]

It’s quite simple, the government or FAA’s motto is that they are for the people, yet they create rules to keep us rodents or soldiers in the hamster wheel, as the busier we are, the less time we have to use logical thought to conclude what is actually happening. There’s an excellent sales pitch that has been the same for the past 100+ years. Although I am more on the business development side or sales side of things, I really dislike false promises or overpromising, but this is frankly the norm and we reward it. Weird.

Now if you look up the Garmin CEO, you only see government issued webpages, no Wikipedia, maybe it’s out there somewhere. Interesting.

So someone at Garmin is in bed with someone at the FAA and they were having drinks at a POA fly-in one evening and said hey let’s make some more money and sell pilots insurance by creating data packs that are already free and make it required. Pilots love insurance and risk, let’s make a sales pitch out of it and charge an AMU out of it.

And there you have it, another AMU is extracted from each pilot annually.

On another note, I had a GNC300XL IFR GPS and sometimes I would input an airport and it would not be in a database, guess what, you simply input the GPS coordinates that I found on foreflight while in flight and wah lah. Works just the same….

I'm really not sure what you're going on about, but the CIFP (Coded Instrument Flight Procedures) file is available for free for anyone from the FAA's website. Just Google CIFP and it'll show it. If you want to create your own method to convert it to a usable format for your GPS device of choice, I suppose that's not a problem. Most people, of course, choose to pay Garmin or Jepp, etc., for that formatting and packaging. But the basic data is available for free, as is appropriate given that it's taxpayer-funded.

Just like the charts are available for free download from the FAA's website, but most people choose to pay someone else (Foreflight, etc.) to package them up and make them easily searchable and accessible. But you could just download them as PDFs and load them onto your device yourself.

I'm not making a comment on whether or not nav databases are overpriced, just pointing out that the raw ARINC 424-18 files ARE available to everyone for free.

And I have really no idea what you mean about the Garmin CEO. A Google search for Garmin CEO returns lots of information about the current CEO, Garmin webpages, a Wikipedia page, etc.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

Well, heck, I never thought owning a 70 year old taildragger design would put me in the rich owner category. I think there is a misplaced assumption that you have to be uber rich to be a pilot, while boat owners can be your average Joe or Jane.

Funny, isn't it? If you own an airplane you're rich, but the folks that own boats, horses, new houses and luxury SUVs are just normal people.

I'm really not sure what you're going on about, but the CIFP (Coded Instrument Flight Procedures) file is available for free for anyone from the FAA's website. Just Google CIFP and it'll show it. If you want to create your own method to convert it to a usable format for your GPS device of choice, I suppose that's not a problem.

Well... It is now, if you use Garmin. There's always been a clause in Garmin's user agreement that you agree not to attempt to reverse-engineer their proprietary format and such, and I think they just figured nobody would go to the trouble.

Until someone apparently did, and maybe started quietly selling them, and Garmin saw that as a big security and liability issue all of a sudden and started madly issuing software updates that now require digitally signed databases. That's why a bunch of us had Garmin panels where the database cross-updating feature stopped working - My GI275, for example, required signed databases prior to when my GTN 750 was updated to handle them, so the 275 rejected database updates until Garmin had an update ready for the 750 and I got it installed. I at least got a year's worth of free databases for my trouble.

 

[chemgeek]

FYI, the navdata you need to fly IFR with a GNS-430 is $299 per year for the entire CONUS. The navdata for the IFD440 is supplied by Jeppesen, and at least in the past that same data has been much more expensive. I think I was paying $350 for the Eastern US only. While it is only "data," that data has to work with the GNS-430 hardware and software.

 

[RussR]

FYI, the navdata you need to fly IFR with a GNS-430 is $299 per year for the entire CONUS.

This is (almost) always my recommendation when doing "new avionics" or "new airplane" training when we talk about updating their databases, almost irrespective of which avionics we're talking about, from a 430 up to full glass panels like G1000/3000.

Almost everybody flies with an iPad or other EFBs these days, so you already have taxi diagrams, approach charts, airport info, obstacles, terrain, frequencies, all that kind of stuff, so there's no compelling reason to pay extra for those options from Garmin. Some owners opt to anyway, but I let them know that the only thing required for IFR flight is the Navdata subscription.

I have found that even in planes that do have all that other stuff, like taxi diagrams for example, I still use my iPad because 1) it's more convenient, 2) usually easier to operate, and 3) I'm already proficient and used to it anyway. So why pay extra if it's not going to be used?

 

[Anthem]

i pay the subscription for my G600Txi and GTN750/650. . . At times in the past, I have also had the data unlock for Jeppesen plates - which really ups the ante (subscription costs). . .lol

But I always caution those that are "upgrading" to consider the data costs. It might save you 3K in installation to say upgrade your GNS530/430 to Avidyne's "drop in" replacement (which is awesome and cool), but if you have a G500/G600 in there - then you now have TWO databases to pay for (avidyne and Garmin). Same is you go aspen and a GTN or something. So be aware that if you have multiple brands - you will have multiple subscriptions. . It even goes so far as if you have a GTN navigator and kept the older GNS530 - Jeppesen will include the G600Txi/GTN750 as a subscription, but the GNS430/530 is an extra $499 or something. Not sure if Garmin includes the older navigators in their onePak pricing but it could also be separate.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

Almost everybody flies with an iPad or other EFBs these days, so you already have taxi diagrams, approach charts, airport info, obstacles, terrain, frequencies, all that kind of stuff, so there's no compelling reason to pay extra for those options from Garmin. Some owners opt to anyway, but I let them know that the only thing required for IFR flight is the Navdata subscription.

Usually, I'd agree. Even on the GTN 750, the plate view is not great. Even on paper there's some small print on the plates, so anything that makes them much smaller physically is going to struggle to show all the detail, especially if it doesn't have a high-res display.

I'm not sure if the G500 TXi/G600 TXi are big enough, but on a G3000 I really like to have the plates available, and I'll split the PFD and put the plate right there on the PFD screen - It's very nice to have everything RIGHT THERE and available with the quickest of glances.

I'm guessing the G3X Touch is similar to the GTN in that it's just a bit too small for a plate (and not high enough resolution to make up for the smaller screen size).

 

[sourdough44]

Say one seldom flys IFR, has the usual IPad with GP or Foreflight. Then along with that an IFR gps on the panel. Say you had current data on the iPad, then just checked anything critical when using the panel mounted unit? In my example the data with the panel mounted is out of date.

Is this a terrible way to operate? Again, in my example seldom flew IFR. There is current data on the plane, just not every unit.

 

[RussR]

Say one seldom flys IFR, has the usual IPad with GP or Foreflight. Then along with that an IFR gps on the panel. Say you had current data on the iPad, then just checked anything critical when using the panel mounted unit? In my example the data with the panel mounted is out of date.

Is this a terrible way to operate? Again, in my example seldom flew IFR. There is current data on the plane, just not every unit.

How are you going to "check anything critical" - how do you see this happening?

Let alone that many (most?) panel-mount GPS AFM Supplements require a current database to be IFR approach legal. Even not considering that, how do you plan to verify the data using your iPad? And what do you define as "critical"?

 

[chemgeek]

Say one seldom flys IFR, has the usual IPad with GP or Foreflight. Then along with that an IFR gps on the panel. Say you had current data on the iPad, then just checked anything critical when using the panel mounted unit? In my example the data with the panel mounted is out of date.

Is this a terrible way to operate? Again, in my example seldom flew IFR. There is current data on the plane, just not every unit.

How are you going to fly an LPV or ILS approach with an iPad? How is your iPad going to notify you of a navigation integrity issue? A tablet is not a legal (or wise) instrument approach device. How are you going to verify that the data on your expired database in the panel unit matches the en route nav data installed on the iPad?

 

[Anthem]

give you an idea - on a return trip, didnt have the latest approach plates in my GPS (but foreflight was up to date). Over oklahoma, they added a new fix on one of their approaches. You wont be able to tell it to fly this approach because you dont have it. Yeah - you can sort of make do with it on your ipad, but you are creating a higher workload environment. You can also tell the controller that you dont have the latetst - and give you another, but that just tells them you are technically not legal. In this case - they knew it was a new fix that was put in place the day before and that many might not have the latest update. But when you dont have 6 months or a years worth of changes - it could get a lot dicier.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

Say one seldom flys IFR, has the usual IPad with GP or Foreflight. Then along with that an IFR gps on the panel. Say you had current data on the iPad, then just checked anything critical when using the panel mounted unit? In my example the data with the panel mounted is out of date.

Is this a terrible way to operate? Again, in my example seldom flew IFR. There is current data on the plane, just not every unit.

If you need to fly an approach, yes this is a terrible way to operate.

IIRC, legally speaking, generally you can verify enroute fixes manually, but you need to have a current database to fly an approach.

Given the unpredictability of weather, and the relatively low cost of databases compared to many other things in aviation, not keeping the navigation database up to date at least is a false economy unless you are strictly VFR.

 

[TCABM]

Say one seldom flys IFR, has the usual IPad with GP or Foreflight. Then along with that an IFR gps on the panel. Say you had current data on the iPad, then just checked anything critical when using the panel mounted unit? In my example the data with the panel mounted is out of date.

Is this a terrible way to operate? Again, in my example seldom flew IFR. There is current data on the plane, just not every unit.

Is the pilot current (legally able to) accept an IFR clearance?

If so, does the AFMS provide a suitable procedure to verify the data in box matches the data presented on the EFB ?

Does the EFB provide the granularity necessary to ensure the data in the box is correct?

 

[Pinecone]

Usually, I'd agree. Even on the GTN 750, the plate view is not great. Even on paper there's some small print on the plates, so anything that makes them much smaller physically is going to struggle to show all the detail, especially if it doesn't have a high-res display.

I'm not sure if the G500 TXi/G600 TXi are big enough, but on a G3000 I really like to have the plates available, and I'll split the PFD and put the plate right there on the PFD screen - It's very nice to have everything RIGHT THERE and available with the quickest of glances.

I'm guessing the G3X Touch is similar to the GTN in that it's just a bit too small for a plate (and not high enough resolution to make up for the smaller screen size).

I have G3X and GTN-750Xi. I put the plate up on both and zoom and pan so that the plan view fills one screen and the profile view is on the other.