The yoke suddenly sent the ailerons into full deflection and the aircraft rolled inverted. My S-TEC went do-lally and scared the crap out of me. I suppose the pace of new product introductions has been so slow that all the smart people moved on years ago. The bottom line is that most GA avionics firms have very little in the way of brains in there. The Honeywell servos are mechanically very good and much better than STEC's but their electronics are rubbish. Their new SB11 just shorts the current sensing resistor with a piece of wire :ugh: In the meantime Honeywell show no sign of wanting to fix their defective servo design whereby the amplifier self destructs if the current limit is activated for more than a few seconds. But Avidyne have recently announced ()that they are switching to the King (Honeywell) servos. Interestingly, when Avidyne (a company which BTW is all words and very little action nowadays, with desperate new product promises and cash-up-front deals for discounts when Box X is certified etc all suggesting they are very short of cash) started doing their DFC90 autopilot, they were going to use STEC servos, to ease the certification process. You can read about the KFC225 here () :) And that cost about 2x what you paid for yours. The quality of GA avionics varies hugely, and autopilots tend to be at the crappy end. I have no problem with products failing but I have a problem paying obscene amounts of money for what is clearly the result of poor build quality and sloppy quality assurance. Such a simple product and after 30 years of producing it, it's hard to believe. They build the stuff exactly like they have been doing for 30 years and it's full of this "proudly made in USA" bullshit while it's just very very poor quality. The servos are very expensive and everything is certified, the company, the production, the product, its application in a given plane etc. I find it totally amazing what crap quality companies like S-TEC deliver. Luckily my dealer still had some spare parts in stock including the shear pin and the repair was done in 10 minutes. Every issue means sending the servo to Texas and (in case out of warranty) pay an obscene fixed price repair fee. S-TEC in their effort to even maximize their obscene margins no longer consider the servos to be field serviceable and no longer make spare parts available to its dealers. When the aircraft was parked in Paris at 33☌, the metal expanded and by intelligent choice of metals, the shaft expanded more than the pin which just fell out (the shaft was probably by coincidence positioned with the pin vertical). That pin has fallen out with the shaft rotating freely. The cog is held in place with a little shear pin pressed through a hole in the cog and shaft.
The servo was opened and what a surprise! It has a little motor which has a cog mounted onto its shaft. The "computer" (what a euphemism for this 1970s analog circuit rubbish) was diagnosed to be fine so the servo was removed which is quite a job involving a slim employee climbing all the way inside the tailcone with hardly any air to breathe. So next trip is to the shop that installed it. It would not notice the error (diagnostics pass) and when engaged happily block my trim wheel. The other day after flying to Paris, leaving the airplane there for 2 days (up to 33☌) I wanted to fly back and noticed that the autopilot would no longer operate the pitch axis.
Don't ask me what I paid for it and how many alternatives I had. The S-TEC 5000 digital autopilot helps reduce pilot workload while significantly improving mission efficiency.Some months ago I got a brand new S-TEC autopilot, system 60-2 with all bells and whistles (GPSS, autotrim, altitude preselect, etc.). Pilots / operators of turboprop and light jet aircraft will appreciate the advanced features that make every phase of flight easier, safer, and more reliable. Maximize the capabilities of your Genesys Aerosystems 3D Synthetic Vision EFIS or other electronic flight instrument system with Area Navigation. S-TEC 5000 Digital Autopilot Advanced, digital control for every phase of flight in high-performance jets and turboprops
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