AIRVENTURE 2023: A REBOUNDING AVIONICS MARKET
When I started going to the big show at Oshkosh (it wasn’t called AirVenture back then) somewhere around 1990, Northstar, Magellan, II Morrow and King were among the most recognizable names in the avionics market. And pilots flocked to Oshkosh for smoking deals on Lorans, handheld GPS units and of course portable radios. Avionics shops and mail order houses loaded their trucks with inventory knowing that showgoers would bring wads of cash to blow on the year’s hottest gadgets. I miss that excitement, but it’s just a different market.
Still, from the perch at Aviation Consumer, my focus at the big show is always on the products, and more recently the health of the avionics supply chain—which was on life support at last year’s show. While not entirely out of the woods, vendors I talked with this year had more normal heart rates. For those who played the right cards and didn’t choke along with the supply, it’s back to delivering fresh new products, or at least getting back to building them. Dynon Avionics finally finished its next-gen small-screen D30 EFIS, adding a long-awaited newer backup for the HDX suite. The electronic component shortages hit Dynon especially hard, but all indications are that it fought its way back to near normal.