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Avionics

Panel Planner 101: Big-Screens RV-10

Assembling your own kit aircraft? The avionics portion of the build can be streamlined thanks to prefabricated and pretested third-party wiring options.

Larry Anglisano
Verified

Edited By:

Omar Filipovic

That’s the back of the RV-10’s Garmin panel on the bench before it went to the airplane. Most of the wiring bundles you see were fabricated and pretested by Stein Air after the builder provided precise lengths and specifications, based on where each remote component will be mounted in the airframe.

This month’s panel for planning is a walk over to the experimental kit market where more owners of certified aircraft are building their own machines in record numbers. One of the many benefits of assembling your own kit is designing a custom avionics suite without having to worry about regulatory approvals for the equipment and STCs for the installation. But for the inexperienced builder, the avionics part of the build can be intimidating, but it really doesn’t have to be.

For this Panel Planner 101 feature we spend some time with Van’s RV-10 builder Mark Welch at his build site where he was knee-deep in putting the final touches on a big-screen Garmin package. It’s the G3X Touch with three 10-inch displays in the landscape configuration—dual PFDs and an MFD, plus Garmin’s EIS engine instrumentation system and GFC 500 autopilot. Because this airplane will be a go-places IFR traveler, Welch (duplicating part of the radio stack in his Piper) went with the Garmin GTN 650Xi navigator. Add it all up, including the accessories and some of the meticulous custom work that went into the build, and it’s a time-consuming stage of the build. For this project, Minnesota-based Stein Air curtailed the effort in a big way, but there was still a lot of effort required from the builder.

Larry Anglisano

Editor in Chief Larry Anglisano has been a staple at Aviation Consumer since 1995. An active land, sea and glider pilot, Larry has over 30 years’ experience as an avionics repairman and flight test pilot. He’s the editorial director overseeing sister publications Aviation Safety magazine, IFR magazine and is a regular contributor to KITPLANES magazine with his Avionics Bootcamp column.