How frequently are avionics on large commercial aircraft updated? And how are the systems updated?
1 Answer
Infrequently. Large fleets, lots of down time, lot of equipment to buy.
The fleets are cycled thru at a refittng center where the panels are disassembled and re-assembled. Here is one example
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$\begingroup$ Though the post doesn't specify it is tagged with
software
, which wouldn't necessarily require lots of new equipment. $\endgroup$– foootMay 17, 2018 at 19:41 -
$\begingroup$ Well, being a hardware engineer, I was looking at from the hardware perspective. I just had new hardware put in my airplane (solid state gyros, GPS/Nav/Com, Transponder, Engine Monitor). And today the software was updated in the gyros and GPS/Nav/Com, which I never had hardware before that could be updated like that. $\endgroup$ May 18, 2018 at 21:30
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$\begingroup$ Even software doesn't get updated that often (Databases like maps are a different animal) For example, avionics company A might only put out a software update from 6 months to 2 years, depending on the product. $\endgroup$ May 19, 2018 at 19:50