Why not offer buyers an option to buy the new Garmin 530 (larger display than the standard 430) without the Arnav display? Although this would undoubtedly cause Cirrus some design and installation headaches on the panel, it would save the buyer the subscription fees on both the Garmin and the Arnav. This option would also save money on the initial cost of the airplane (and perhaps raise Cirrus’ profits a bit). It seems to me that both units can (or will be able to) do just about the same thing – weather uplinks, etc. If not this model year, they should consider either abandoning the Arnav or offering an option without it. I’m afraid the Arnav is going to become a white elephant. Also note that the Arnav cannot be used as a “primary navigation” instrument, according to the Cirrus POH.
Why not offer buyers an option to buy the new Garmin 530
This quite possibly will happen, but Cirrus have quite a few other items on their agenda at the moment, so don’t expect to see it this year.
it would save the buyer the subscription fees on both the Garmin and the Arnav.
Since the Arnav is not a primary navigation device, you don’t need to keep the database up-to-date.
It seems to me that both units can (or will be able to) do just about the same thing
True, but the Arnav is still bigger than the 530.
I’m afraid the Arnav is going to become a white elephant.
I personally think the big display is a plus, although some of the other MFDs now on the market look a lot better than the Arnav, but I suspect this is largely due to the fact that Arnav have been concentrating on the radar weather uplink business lately, and so have probably neglected the development of applications for the big display. Bear in mind that until now, the market for a 10.4" MFD was vanishly small. With Cirrus now installing quite a few, that should change, and we should see more development. In particular, I want to see the engine management finished - Cirrus were going to do that themselves, since they were dissatisfied with what Arnav were proposing, but of course never got around to it, due to limited resources.
The Stormscope interface is done, and the weather uplink will undoubtedly be ready soon, since this is Arnav’s jewel right now. For the future, expect to see approach charts, sectionals etc. probably with a DVD drive installed somewhere.
Why not offer buyers an option to buy the new Garmin 530 (larger display than the standard 430) without the Arnav display? Although this would undoubtedly cause Cirrus some design and installation headaches on the panel, it would save the buyer the subscription fees on both the Garmin and the Arnav. This option would also save money on the initial cost of the airplane (and perhaps raise Cirrus’ profits a bit). It seems to me that both units can (or will be able to) do just about the same thing – weather uplinks, etc. If not this model year, they should consider either abandoning the Arnav or offering an option without it. I’m afraid the Arnav is going to become a white elephant.
I was/am afraid of the same thing - see my post of about a week ago. However, as Walt mentioned, there’s an article in this month’s AOPA Pilot about weather uplink, in which they (very) briefly describe some of the displays as well. For the Arnav display, they mention all kinds of goodies as being available – don’t have the article in front of me now, but I seem to remember approach plates, traffic info (skywatch/tcad), stormscope, of course the weather uplink, etc.
So that might be interesting… I wonder how many of these addons are already working with Arnav units somewhere (and thus just need to be made to work with the SR20 specifically) and how many are still pie-in-the-sky? I guess it’d be nice if Arnav’s web site had better info - it looks like it hasn’t been updated for years!
Also, maybe some of the people who have seen one of the units can comment here – how good is the display resolution? From the photos I’ve seen, it doesn’t look all that great; the displays from Avidyne (to pick one example) seem much better [I’ve seen pictures of sectionals on an Avidyne display that look pretty cool]. But if they’re saying that approach plates are supposed to be available for Arnav, it seems like they’d need higher resolution than what it looks like in pictures…
Steve