How Reliable Is Your Panel?

(from a related thread)
It worked fine but I could hear it on the radio. Puting the switch in a
metal box and grounding the box should help but it seems silly to me since
the Volkslogger and SN-10 both can log the flight and are both very
reliable. Of course the SN-10 log can't be used for badges or records but
it could probably be used as a backup if the Volkslogger failed (which is
not likely if reliable 12V power is assured).

Forgive me if I cringe at words such as "very reliable" and "not
likely." With all due respect to the technical wizards, these
assurances are maddening for anyone who's lost a flight due to flight
recorder or other electronic equipment failure.

I've had two unrelated GPS flight recorder failures in the past 12
months, neither caused by power problems. I know of several other
logger failures at the Hobbs U.S. Standard Class Nationals this
summer. Some folks had backups, some lost all points. Most serious
contest pilots now carry a backup flight recorder which, at nearly
$1,000 each, is an expensive form of insurance.

My faithful LNAV is still crunching away 12 years after I bought it
(albeit with a number of firmware upgrades) but takeoff grids and this
newsgroup are buzzing with complaints about problems with expensive
varios/flight computers. Most of us have backup varios but I've seen
few redundant full-race systems.

How frequently do these things fail? With the perspective of nearly 40
years of soaring, my answer is "increasingly often."

What appears to be a significant problem with flight recorder
reliability is mirrored by the agonized howls I heard this summer with
many of today's state-of-the-art vario/flight computers. The common
thread to all of this is the growing complexity of modern electronic
flight management systems and the small size of the soaring market
exacerbated by the profusion of small companies playing in it. I'm a
died-in-the-wool capitalist and I welcome the advances in
functionality that competition brings. But the unfortunate side effect
is that no single instrument or device is ever produced in sufficient
quantity to wring all the bugs out of it.

The ironic result is that many of us own spares for the cheap but
highly reliable stuff like PDAs (low cost and reliability being the
result of large non-soaring markets and high production volumes) but
only one of the really expensive but more temperamental
soaring-specific systems such as flight computers.

Flight recorders are somewhere in between. They work most--but not
all--the time, and they are sufficiently affordable to allow carrying
a spare.

I'm being simplistic here, obviously. I'm lumping together software,
hardware, and power issues, and ignoring differences across brands.
But I'm still troubled by the growing sense that "progress" is pushing
us into greater and greater dependence on electronic gadgets whose
reliability is proving to be less than acceptable to serious
cross-country and competition pilots.

At the end of the day, most of us are seeking the least expensive
combination of reliable, highly functional, easy-to-use equipment that
provides the most flexibility, compatibility, and redundancy. That
shouldn't be so difficult, right?

I don't have the answer, if indeed others think this is a problem. But
I'd welcome other perspectives.

Chip Bearden