So, without a contact point at Dynon to complain about my issues other than Tech Support and them stonewalling, I published my experience here as well as on Dynon's Facebook page. Someone must have finally read it and wrote me an email. The email is from Robert who's the Director of Sales and Marketing at Dynon.
What do you think he told me? An apology? Are you kidding me? They are the industry leader in experimental avionics! They don't apologize for nuthin'!
He explained their return policy again, detailing the problems of the vendor. Well, these problems are not unfamiliar to me. However, I am the customer in this case and their problems are really not mine. While I am sympathetic to their problems, I still end up with the short straw when they send broken units to customers.
Here's our email exchange which I assume to be part one - if they have any decency at all:
July 3rd, 2012
Robert,
thank you for replying to my report of bad experience with Dynon.
As you took the time to explain your reasons for the replacement policy I have so much grief with, let me explain how I feel as a customer.
I spent around $16000 on avionics for my RV-12 build. Some of it contained non-Dynon parts but for the most of it these are all Dynon Skyview parts. Overall there where 7 Dynon units, the SV display, EMS, ADAHRS, transponder, GPS and two servos. I put everything together as per plans and although this is my first airplane build, building an ELSA is not comparable to a full EAB approach where you had to invent your own electrical layout and wiring. Even if that would have been the case, as a software and electrical engineer, I had had enough background to tackle that as well.
The servos went into the plane a year ago when access was still easy but they couldn't get tested until the rest of the avionics was installed which was delayed about half a year due to Van's.
However, a couple of months back I was able to finally purchase the rest of the avionics and I finished the installation. When I was testing the system, I experienced very odd behavior related to the autopilot bus. I did a full check on the wiring, I traced every single signal through the bus up to the servo connections and I even swapped the Van's Control Module as I wanted to make sure it wasn't a problem with something I had my hands on. Finally, after around 18 hours of tracing signals, I could narrow it down to one servo being the culprit. Getting at these servos now is major pain and I'd rather had found a problem in my wiring! I contacted Dynon to get the servo replaced (remember, this is a unit out of the box, brand new that had never worked a minute before it failed and screwed up the bus so bad that when enabled it made the ADAHRS and EMS disappear!). They sent me a refurbished one which I didn't care too much about at that time. The servo I received was ok but not exactly what I would expect for a brand new unit for which I paid full price. I put it back in and everything worked - or so I thought.
After a while of learning the SV functions I noticed that my OAT display never showed a temperature reading. So I learned what type of probe this is and saw that it should just provide a varying resistance with changing temps. I traced the wires again, made sure that I got good and solid resistance readouts and that they made sense with the ambient temps at measurement. All this with the help of Dynon Tech Support. It turned out that the sensor appeared to be working fine and it was suspected that the connector was faulty, so they sent me a pre-wired connector which I crimped on, verified for a good crimp and connected it to the ADAHRS - to no avail. I analyzed the problem a bit more and with more hours of debugging invested, finally found that the culprit appeared to be a bad solder joint or a crack in the PCB of the ADAHRS as the problem disappeared when the ADAHRS was chilled down and then reappeared and was persistent when the unit reached a certain heat level. We swapped the ADAHRS with a refurbished one. The unit I received had brass connectors for the pressure line hook-ups that were so oxidized that they looked like the unit was installed on a boat instead of an airplane. I can't say that I was happy at that point.
Let's summarize, shall we?
I paid $16000 for avionics. I suppose that $12-13k went for Dynon products. I received 7 units of which 2 failed out of the box. One of them is a unit that is pretty important for the safe flying of an aircraft. I spent shipping expenses to have these unit sent back that should have never been faulty out of the box. I even debugged the problem for the techs to a level where they could quickly verify that issue and fix it.
I spent around 30 hours on determining the problems and ensuring that they were problem with Dynon and not with me or Van's and I wasn't coy about letting Tech Support know what I did, why I did and what I found, so they could tell that I knew what I was doing and that I didn't just sent stuff around to cover up my own incompetence.
What did I expect to receive from Dynon for my money? How about tested equipment? It's well known in the electronics industry how electronic products fail. There's a high failure rate in the beginning of its use which can be dramatically reduced in shipped products by providing a burn-in test to eliminate duds before they get to the customer. I am sure you are aware of this as you mentioned 'burn-in; yourself. So, I came to ask myself, how is it possible to receive 2 defective units out of the box from the industry leader in experimental avionics? While only you can answer this truthfully, I wonder if Dynon does perform burn-ins on new products. I wonder if the burn-ins are long enough to avoid a failure rate of 2/7 = 28% in my case. Is Dynon really testing all the functions of a unit before shipping or just browsing over some of them quickly?
After all you charge $1200 for an ADAHRS unit. Is it too much to ask for if I expect a unit that has been fully tested to specs and that is working right out of the box and hopefully for quite some time in return for this huge amount of money? I don't think so.
Instead though you took the money, you kept it even after I told you that this just not acceptable for me (for the above reasons) and even made me pay for shipping in addition to hours of debugging time (which in other cases would have been much longer with less experienced builders).
Why did I not opt for the repair option for my faulty equipment? Simple! After spending so much time locating the root cause of the problems, I didn't want to spend even more time shipping in the stuff, waiting for the repair and shipping turn around on top of what I had already lost. The point is simply that this equipment should just not have been broken out of the box to begin with. I discovered the ADAHRS OAT problems when I had taken time off from work to get forward on my build. Wasting this time by waiting for Dynon to repair brand new equipment was simply not an option.
I understand that you have to be sure that you're not swapping working units for new ones due to builders making mistakes. In my case, I can assure you I gave Tech Support no reason to believe that I hadn't done my part of the end to ensure that there was no other possible cause for the issues I had seen. With the OAT I even took the old, cut off connector and soldered on a 10k Ohms resistor to ensure that it was neither the connector nor some funky OAT sensor problem and let the Tech Support people know that I did that.
So, what was my summary of these incidents?
As mentioned above I paid a large amount of money and I did not receive from Dynon what I should have received. I feel ripped off and taken advantage of as I do not have an option to go with an avionics package from a competitor when building an ELSA project that calls for Dynon avionics. The Tech Support was helpful but did not direct to anybody else at Dynon to address my complaints about these policies. No attempt from Dynon was made to address the issues mentioned above, nor was I told who to talk to.
It also left me with that bad taste of distrust in the QA process at Dynon and the reliability of the products. If they fail at 28% right out of the box, what can I expect when the plane finally goes flying? If the products are reliable, where do all the refurbished items come from?
Anyway, Robert, if you got that far, I think you understand why I am still upset about this. And believe me, I understand you side of the problem as well. However, I am the customer in this scenario and it's my hard earned money that I spent for expecting working products when I receive them. And Dynon did just not deliver their end of the deal. No, they cost me even more money and a lot more time to fix what I shouldn't have had to fix.
An apology would have been nice. A check to compensate for the trouble, the time and my expenses would have been even more appreciated.
Nothing like that was offered. I felt like it was all my fault and I should just be darn happy that I was sent refurbished equipment, that looked like it went through a war in one case, so I could get a working system.
Sorry, Robert, that just doesn't do it for me. My decision to not chose Dynon in my next project results directly and only from this experience. When it works, it works nicely, as I said. But 28% failure rate out of the box? Not acceptable!
Regards,
Torsten.
On 07/02/2012 04:43 PM, Robert wrote:
> Dear Torsten,
>
> I think I talked to you at one point about your OAT probe, and your need for a two-pronged plug. I just read your post on our Facebook page, and apologize that we didn't live up to your expectations about sending new units to replace defective units. We take product issues seriously, and work hard to have the highest quality products on the market. I flew a certified plane for ten years and had plenty of problems with my certified avionics, so I know the bar isn't very high in the industry. But we try to get as close to perfect as we can.
>
> I do have a question for you. Please tell me what you think of this policy after I give you the details.
>
> We sell to thousands of builders working on hundreds of different types of aircraft. Most of the builders are working on their first aircraft. So it is understandable that when there are product installation problems, the majority of the time it is induced by the builder. When we face a problem we always give the builder two choices; either we will look at their equipment and fix the problem if there is one, or we will send immediately a "re-manufactured" unit that is functionally the same as a new unit. Most often it has new components, and has undergone the same or better inspection, burn-in, calibration and test than even "new" units.
>
> If we didn't do this, then most often we would be sending out a new unit for a perfectly good but used unit, and soon would have thousands of returned units stacking up in the warehouse. I hope you can see our dilemma. We want to help customers as quickly as possible, with the best solution possible, but the nature of it is that we can't send a new unit every time. Numerically it doesn't work. And we hope it is fair, because the customer has the choice to have us look at their equipment if that is the best option for them. We pay for the cost of testing and inspecting and shipping the unit back to the customer, even when there was never a product problem.
>
> Does that policy make sense? If not, how do we improve it, without raising prices to cover the cost of thousands of perfectly good products being sent back to us?
>
> Best Regards,
> Robert
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