iFly GPS Forum

Sigh...

Don, I appreciate your response, it was friendly.  Thanks!

But I did not "blow my top" on the FB group.  I pointed out what I thought was a safety issue that other pilots should be aware of, and voiced my frustration at getting no response from AP.  Right or wrong, yeah I get frustrated when I point out something I consider a safety of flight problem and the company involved just doesn't respond.  It appears that AP didn't get the support request I sent them, even though their web form said "email successfully submitted" so I assumed (rightly, I think) that was the case.

Frankly the response I got from that post was embarrassing for the community.  NOBODY other than Brolin tried to offer any suggestions or help.  The sum total of the comments were questions if I was a new pilot, and direct or veiled insinuations that I was a terrible and unsafe pilot, apparently because I expected alerting features to work.  Somebody even said the picture I posted looked like it from from a flight sim and not real.  Mmmkay.  "it's only for situational awareness" and "you're dumb to rely on obstacle/traffic alerts" are paraphrases of some of the comments.  It then progressed into expectations that I'd be in the papers as a smoking hole in the ground -- real nice, guys.  So I deleted the post. 

I do NOT expect 100% reliablility, and I know how to look out the window.  I've been doing it all across the USA for well over ten years now, and more than half of that time didn't involve obstacle databases or traffic alerts.  In training I did my cross country flight and checkride without a GPS in the airplane.  I'm not gadget-dependent. 

But the alerts on this 740b unit are *nowhere* near as accurate as the 13 year old 496 I replaced.  Does that seem like an "upgrade"?  If we're not supposed to at least reference these features, why do we spend money on them?  Why does the FAA mandate ADS-B?  Why do they want to use it in preference to the terminal radar systems for NEXRAD?  Are these features not part of the safety picture at all?  If not, why hang out on FB groups or forums dedicated to these systems??

The answer I'm getting from Brolin at AP is that this is working as designed.  Even though I have the "planned airports" option selected in the "disable alerts when approaching..." setting, the unit will *still* disable alerts if you are at 1000ft AGL over airports, even over private grass fields like I was in the video I posted.  It assumes you are landing  This does not seem like behavior most pilots would expect, but it's AP's product and they can set it up however they like.  But it's a no-go for me and my type of flying.  I spend 60% of my time in the local area at 1000ft AGL or so flying to small, challenging grass strips.  A system that turns off alerts in those circumstances might as well not be in my airplane.

And we have not even begun to address the air-to-air traffic situation.  I flew a four hour trip at 5500-6500ft with another airplane, and did not see him on ADS-B the entire trip, in spite of the ADS-B reporting "receiving" as a status.  He saw me the whole way on his Garmin gear. 

One of the forum members suggested I put my airplane's hex code in my Startux and disable ghost traffic filtering.  I did that, and the pictures I posted in this thread show the results.  I flew for 1.5hr with two other airplanes at distances of 0.1nm to 2nm.  I never once saw them as traffic targets (though I saw other targets).  My friend with a 720 in his airplane also saw no targets.  The other airplane, with Garmin gear (different airplane than the one mentioned in the previous paragraph) saw us the entire time.  Other traffic alerting failures have been documented in the first post or two of this thread.  How many are related to the same alerting behavior as obstacles I don't know.  When targets don't even show up on the screen I'm guessing this is a different issue.

I was texting my friend with the 720 mentioned above about these issues, just asking him if he had seen similar issues.  His response:  "iFly alerts suck."  I'm not putting this in there to trash on AP or their products, I'm including it to show I'm not the only one having issues.  I was VERY excited to get the iFly 740b in my airplane -- great price, a big touch screen, lots of features, affordable subscription and updates, a small and responsive company.  I wanted to love this unit. But the sour taste left in my mouth by the combination of technical issues, and a community of ankle-biters who want to attack pilots instead of problems, is driving me back to Garmin.  My confidence is just not high in this unit.  If alerts don't work as expected, what else doesn't?  GPS position?  Airspace placement? I'm guessing a GDL-50 and Aera 660 or 760 are in my near future.