New products to be introduced soon

[Dw1oakes]

I attended the LSA Expo. I talked to your company's rep. He indicated that this year the company would introduce muliti leg GPS and Vertical autopilot settings.
Am I correct in his thinking?
I am considering on the purchase of a Garmin 300 XL. If your company does introduce these new features I would not need the external GPS but could instead purchase a Garmin SL40 or other brands of radio?
Thanks
Dave/ indiana

 

[dynonsupport]

Both of those are indeed in our plans. Dates are never definite until we have a feature queued up for "the next release". Multi-leg flight planning will very likely be in the release after the one we're closing in on, and the advance AP should be sometime after that. So both are on the nearer term rough-order-of-things schedule. We tend to be a bit looser with our personal expectations for these things at shows, as you've discovered . But keep in mind that things are very often in flux until T-a few weeks before a software release.

The 300XL only ties into the multi-leg GPS portion of your question, since it does not provide vertical guidance information for an autopilot to follow. But basically, yes, our multi-leg flight planning feature would do much the same things as other GPS units multi-leg capabilities. The one difference is that only a certified unit can be used if you're planning to file /G and fly IFR using its capabilities.

 

[airguy]

And both of these capability changes will be software-driven, assuming a GPS capable of vertical nav such as a 430W?

 

[dynonsupport]

On our first generation of products, these features will be tied to the AP76 for sure. We just don't have the buttons and interface to do more control modes without a control panel.

SkyView may tie the advanced AP features to an external control panel as well, but this it still to be determined.