Ain’t their storage. It’s the amount our things in our airplanes can store. They can only cram so many bits and bytes into a download our card, chip or whateveryacallit can handle. It’s reduce the number of airports you can ‘subscribe’ to or reduce the amount of stuff per airport. I think. That’s what I get out of reading the headlines and a paragraph or two
Their own craptacular certification system created all those storage limited certified devices.
Everything else in tech can pop in a monster sized SD card and fix the problem because the hardware is updated CHEAP.
The certification process holds back what hardware and software can be used in the devices by a decade, and then the silly things can’t take a large SD card or whatever the portable mass storage device of the day is, in any modern tech.
Paying $10,000 for a “certified” GPS that can’t handle a large SD card because the “certified” processor is too slow to even handle it, let alone the card reader chipset itself, is directly related here.
FAA created the certified avionics hardware limitations nightmare.
It’s not all that hard to fix even with the old hardware. Look at the Garmin Flightstream 510 as a solid example of a piece of hardware that could do more...
As it stands, that SD card sized device can create both a WiFi and Bluetooth network and double as a 32 GB storage device.
How about this? Use the “Pack for trip” model from ForeFlight. Have the in panel GPS reach out to a tablet that has all of the navdata in it right after you load a flight plan, and load a swath of airport and approach data as wise as the aircraft’s actual range, from departure to destination following the flight track.
Dump the rest. Only kick stuff out of the SD card storage that is the furthest away from the track to make room for the trip and leave everything else in there.
If the route is Colorado to Wisconsin, you can safely let the in-panel device dump everything west of Utah, and almost everything one State of buffer east of Wisconsin. Won’t be needing Texas or the Gulf coast, or Idaho to Washington State in this flight, either.
That’s just one way to do it. All sorts of ways to skin the “too much data” cat. Get out of the manufacturer’s way and they’d come up with it to keep customers happy via new software, no matter how large the base FAA database becomes.
I don’t think they’re really concerned about what our devices will hold anyway. The original GPS units had to split to regional data loads a long time ago, and FAA wasn’t concerned about it then. I see no reason why they’d care now.
This is about their internal problems with that many approaches. They don’t care if your KLN89 can hold it all. They also won’t care when your spiffy new GTN can’t either.
Their hardware certification process slows down the uptake on hardware that can handle that much data easily. It’s commonplace in consumer electronics. Most people’s DSLR cameras can handle more data than their panel mount GPS can. Easily.
I’m sure the manufacturers would love to offer methods to handle more data or just release cheap new products regularly instead of having a decade or more long product development cycle in the fast-changing tech world.
Hell, let the manufacturer certify some way to suck the data needed off of a simple and cheap USB 3 portable SSD that’s powered from the panel unit, if the problem is storage space.
Panel asks you to plug it in once the flight plan is entered and you can maybe say “lock” your home State or any number of them from being overwritten. Use the rest for the swath of aircraft range that the flight plan covers.
