Knew my Garmin G500 was going bad, but it finally picked a real bad time to fail

Had a Garmin G500H in a Bell 407 flash a bunch of warning flags last Thursday right as we were buttoning up for a test flight. Three hours of troubleshooting later I found a cracked pin on the backplane connector, not the box itself. Got it fixed with a donor connector from a scrap unit we had in the back. Anyone else run into intermittent failures that look like a line replaceable unit but end up being a wiring issue?

2 comments

2 Comments

gray_patel13d agoProlific Poster

Honestly I see this a little different. A cracked pin on the backplane connector is still a hardware failure in the G500 system, not really a wiring issue since the connector is part of the LRU assembly. If you had to pull a donor part from a scrap unit, that tells me the connector design itself is borderline fragile and Garmin should have used something more robust for aviation use. Glad you got it sorted though, those intermittent ghosts are the worst.

adam_butler3813d ago

Had three cracked pins on a G500 display connector last year myself, same damn problem.