Those one or two of you that got excited about this Avidyne press release may save yourselves the anticipation.

I own a couple-year-old EX500 MFD in GXRP’s avionics suite. It works fine, but was missing an extra-cost feature that would be particularly handy with my realignment of IFR navigation data sources. This feature used to cost $2500 and included a hardware tweak, but about a month ago Avidyne announced that it would be a mere $500. I asked my avionics shop to go for it.

A few days later, they sheepishly came back, reporting that Avidyne is tying this particular upgrade to another one, which by the way costs $1000.

OK, in aviation, everything is expensive. Electronic, mechanical, liquid, it doesn’t matter. But it bugs me to no end that this company has the gall to preserve a misleading press release/advertisement, with no apologies and no corrections – let alone consideration for those who took it at face value, relying on their dealers to disappoint the customers. It’s not right.