4 ms·
Pulling your own avionics is legal if your airplane is experimental. If you want to hack your airplane, you should clearly have an experimental, not a certified
by lutorm 10y ago
Pulling your own avionics is legal if your airplane is experimental. If you want to hack your airplane, you should clearly have an experimental, not a certified one.
It is my understanding that, in an experimental, you can even legally fly IFR with a GPS you built yourself, as long as it complies with the performance standards and you document the test data that verifies that it does so. Whether it's wise to do so is a different question.
- paulmd 10y agoI didn't consider experimental and I agree it sounds more reasonable there. I'm not super familiar with experimental regs, other than the obvious "no commercial use" rule and the necessity of hanging on real tight while you bump and wobble your way down the strip :P Interesting about the fact that you can fly IFR on your own GPS. I would not have figured that would be allowed since you will be around other aircraft under similar weather conditions/operating rules. Particularly in Class Bravo airspace where it's busy. Or are there other restrictions about experimental aircraft in Class B?
- spitfire 10y agoWhy wouldn't you? You can fly IFR with a paper map and a few instruments.
- paulmd 10y agoAs long as the paper maps and your instruments are accurate, that's perfectly legitimate. There's no guarantee that a random GPS you built yourself is anywhere near accurate, doesn't have random edge cases, etc. That's problematic when there's a high density of other aircraft containing hundreds of people around. Not saying it's not legal, it just surprises me because the FAA is usually really cautious.