SPC #71 – Homage to 2009 – Nexair Update

all right.

I'm back from Oshkosh and we're going to start with the little.

homage to the old days of the student pilot cast and

reconnect with Nexair avionics.

On another project they've been working on.

Are you ready to bring an incredible aircraft?

That's not even that old in airplane terms into the future at a fraction of

the cost of an incredibly high price, new version of the same aircraft.

Are you confused yet?

Well, listen or watch on and get deacon fused in episode 71.

Of the student pilot cast.

Welcome back SPC listeners.

I'm going to kick off the post OSH 20.

24 era of the podcast with a little throwback.

An homage, if you will, to the, one of the episodes I did back in the early

Yep.

That's 15 years ago, man.

Time flies.

Anyway.

Back then we did a quick feature on Nexair avionics with David Featherston from

Nexair on their Saratoga NX product line.

I loved the concept.

And I love the airplane they had on display back then.

So since it's my podcast, I did the feature and released it, even though

it didn't have a lot to do with training or being a student pilot.

But I do that sometimes as you know, because if I'm interested.

Some of you probably will be too.

Well, I ran across David again at . and.

A new airplane.

Well, I mean, A new wish airplane.

Where they're taking a similar concept and applying it to the most

popular GA single piston there is.

A Cirrus.

Specifically, we'll be talking about the Cirrus Sr 22 turbo model.

But not the new gen seven that Cirrus just announced for over a million dollars.

Nope.

This one's going to be a gen three.

Brought into modernity with a big avionics upgrade.

And being sold by Nexair for less than half.

Of the new one.

I got to talk to David briefly and he claimed to remember the interview

we did back then 15 years ago.

But I think he might've been just being nice.

I mean, seriously.

I say that because I barely remember it myself and I have an RSSP that

helps me remember all the details.

So next time, of you talked to David, find out the real story.

Maybe you can do it when you're ordering your own Sr 22 upgrades.

After talking to the guys at Nexair for a bit, Brian Wolf sales manager,

there agreed to do a feature with me the next morning I had to contain

my questions, which were plenty until we were talking on camera.

So I didn't know lot about what they were up to until we talked

on the record, so to speak.

Turns out.

Not much has changed.

Except for the airplanes, the avionics that are considered

state-of-the-art the mission of the aircraft and the age of the.

All right.

So technically a lot has changed.

But the business model, that Nexair is pursuing is pretty

close to what they were doing.

Way back then.

Yes.

They will work on many different types of airplanes.

And yes, they can be a pretty typical avionic shop.

I think.

And you can hire them to upgrade parts of your panel or

do the whole kitten caboodle.

But I find their approach to focusing in, on a very popular, specific airplane

and really learn what it takes to bring it forward avionics wise and

pursue buyers or owners who don't want to spend oodles of money on a

brand new airplane, but would rather upgrade theirs or even buy a used one.

And have that upgraded.

And then do it for a fraction of the cost.

I find that very pro GA.

Pro airplane.

And basically pro regular person.

So in other words, I find it kind of awesome.

So.

Listen, or watch to my quick conversation with Brian in front of a gorgeous

2007, Sr 22 turbo gen three airplane.

Here you go.

Welcome everybody back to another special episode of the Student Pilot Cast.

I'm here with Brian from Nexair Avionics.

And Brian, I'd like you to just introduce yourself a little bit.

Yeah, sure.

So, my name is Brian Wolf.

I work for Nexair Avionics primarily in their sales department

and aircraft integration.

G500 TXI conversions and kind of modernizing that aging Cirrus fleet.

Awesome.

And tell me why you're in aviation.

So I got the aviation bug when I was a kid, just kind of like everybody else,

a friend of the family who's at an old Skyhawk and, you know, kind of really

migrated toward it and uh, really enjoyed, uh, flying when I started when I was 17,

similar to everyone else and continued the flight training through college and

then ended up at Nexair shortly after on a lot of this cutting edge avionics stuff.

Do you still get to fly a little bit?

So I fly a fair bit for the company.

Uh, so a lot of our customers are not local to the Boston area.

That's where we're based out of.

Uh, so it is not uncommon for me to fly one of our customers

in or home for upgrades.

Uh, and we have customers as far away as, uh, Boston to L.

A., uh, Vancouver.

We've gone to France before to work on airplanes, so really a, a

pretty wide reach of, uh, customers in flying around the country.

I did an interview with, uh, Nexair.

Um, because they were, they were working at the time, uh, they had, they had done

some STCs and we're working on a Saratoga.

They called it the Saratoga NX.

Um, I fell in love with the concept and with the airplane.

Um, it was all brand new avionics at the time.

Um, little long in the tooth by this time, but, but I thought it was an

interesting concept and I really loved it.

So I did an interview there.

You can, uh, go back and watch that.

Uh, but.

I noticed this year, um, that they've got this beautiful Cirrus here.

It's a, it's a G3.

Yeah.

It's a, um, SR22, uh, turbo normalized.

Uh, so we purchased it to do our Garmin conversions in it.

So, uh, not only this aircraft is equipped with the Garmin G500 TXI system

we created, but we've done somewhere between 30 and 35 other aircraft as well.

So, uh, this aircraft is equipped with two Garmin 10.

6 inch G500 TXI screens.

Garmin GTN 750XI, 650XI, uh, with a lot of other Garmin, um, products,

including their newest product, the GDL60, their plane sync device for

remote aircraft status, remote database updates, cockpit, um, integration.

Very cool.

Yeah.

So, um, most of us know that Cirrus has just released a, a

new version of, of the, uh, SR22.

Yeah.

SR22.

Um, and this seems to be almost equivalent to that, uh, but for a lot less money.

Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, sure.

So, uh, our kind of primary market for the Cirrus aircraft is your G1s through

your G3s, so pre prospective airplanes.

Avidon G3 was, uh, So basically what we look for in a customer's aircraft

when we start the conversation is uh, Are you an Avidyne aircraft?

Are you a six pack aircraft?

What's currently equipped and what's your end goal along with

your mission budget and technology?

So we try to help our customers navigate those items to try to optimize

the best use out of their airplanes.

Cool.

Um, I'm, I'm sure that these new avionics have improved capabilities and, uh,

ease of use and, uh, pilot workload.

Can you talk a little bit about how the avionics have improved over the ones that

Cirrus had, uh, had installed initially?

Oh yeah, sure.

So, big improvements with all these, uh, devices we've installed in here.

So, uh, it's hard to list them all in all honesty, but a couple of the

big ones that a lot of these Cirrus aircraft were non WAS aircraft.

So they were really restricted to non precision GPS approaches.

So this aircraft is WAS equipped, so LPV, LNAV plus V, basically

anything with vertical guidance we can see, um, including step downs.

It'll fly step downs via its vertical nav, uh, Part of the autopilot.

So pretty cool stuff on their arrivals and some of these approaches as well.

Other big thing that the Integra system didn't have that a lot of our customers

really love is this synthetic vision.

So synthetic vision is now integrated in this aircraft.

Um, seeing runways, any obstacles, traffic, really great for

situational awareness for the pilot.

Also, this one's integrated Garmin smart glide feature.

So smart glide being a feature that is really meant to help the.

Pilot in a really an emergency where the aircraft will take over if the

buttons depressed, the autopilot will pitch up to the best glide speed,

steer you to the nearest airport with the biggest runway, tune the weather

when you're in the airport environment.

It comes over the intercom system.

It says airport environment, maneuver and land.

So it's a real big safety improvement and there's so many other things that

they've integrated to try to help that pilot in those critical situations.

Yeah, so the auto glider, that safety feature, I guess it gives the

pilot time to run some checklists, maybe try and alleviate the

emergency some other way while the airplane is doing the aviate part.

Well, yeah,

exactly.

So, uh, all of us know, you know, it's very hard for humans to sit

there and In that critical time of flight, not only to focus on flying

the aircraft, but maybe run through your checklist, maybe understand why

you're seeing that, um, you know, kind of emergency situation, rough running

engine, engine, not running it at all.

So it's a huge helping hand.

One of those ones we all hope to never use.

Right.

Yeah, that's right.

So, um, I'm curious a little bit about the business model.

So if we could kind of focus a little bit away from the airplane itself, I hate

to do that, but focus a little away from the airplane, um, kind of understand how

you guys, um, are running these upgrades.

So, um, I know you've got this airplane here and, uh, as I

understand it, it's for sale.

Like you're, you're ready to sell it.

And can you talk a little bit about, um, How you're generally doing this?

Is it mostly customers come to you with an airplane and want you to retrofit it?

Or do you sometimes do these on spec where you acquire the airplane, retrofit

it, and then sell it to somebody?

Yeah.

So, uh, probably about.

95 percent or more of our business is getting our customers

aircraft and bringing them up to speed on the TXI system.

So this aircraft was really purchased for us because we all like to fly and

it's always nice to have an airplane.

So it's not uncommon for us at Nexair to grab an aircraft, upgrade the avionics,

maybe do a paint job on it, have an airplane to fly for a little bit, and

also do some of these fun marketing things to make it, uh A reason to fly.

So, um, our process really is a lot of our sales are trading driven.

we started offering trading incentives.

Trade in your 430s for the GTNs.

So a lot of our customers over the years until the TXI was released,

we were doing a lot of services on those trading incentives.

Now that the G500 TXI and some other PFD and MFD solutions are becoming

available for the series, we're now circling back with our customers

and removing the Integra displays and installing Garmin displays.

Once again, running that kind of trade up promotion gives you some

credit for your older displays and gives you the best options out there.

Excellent.

Okay, so every once in a while you build one on spec and sell

it, But most of the time it's your customers bringing something to you.

Do you do any consulting?

If somebody wants to get into a Cirrus, like the ones that you retrofit, do

they ever come to you before they've acquired the airplane and maybe get

some help finding the right airplane?

Oh yeah, it happens all the time.

So we have a lot of customers that sit there.

They're excited to get in the Cirrus.

They're excited to see what it has to offer.

Maybe you're not in the purchasing category of wanting to go out

and buy a brand new G7, but want similar avionics with.

the same capabilities, um, with an older aircraft.

So a lot of times I'll work with customers and they'll sit there and in their search,

they'll send me links of the aircraft.

They find controller trade a plane wherever they may.

And we'll go ahead and kind of give them the, uh, the overlay, you know,

a quick email of, You know rough costs for everything and how it's gonna

work in their aircraft Maybe they have some systems in their aircraft

that are worth a little more money.

So the trades are a little better And then once they acquire the aircraft,

then we work on getting them a formalized estimate working them into the schedule,

you know Right now we're running about, you know, somewhere around three to

four months out So that kind of planning purpose is important for us because

a lot of the modifications we do the aircraft or before the aircraft arrives

We integrate a whole main aircraft harness to the existing Cirrus harness.

Um, so that is built before the aircraft arrives to the shop.

We have some custom instrument panels that we have to make to accommodate

all of our new equipment that is made before the customer enters the shop.

So there's a bit of the planning process that we try to get ahead on.

So when your aircraft comes to Nexair, it doesn't sit there

stale in the corner of the shop.

So our TXI conversions, we try our best to move them between four and six weeks.

That's kind of amazing.

So somebody could bring an aircraft to you, um, at least with a little

bit of, uh, foreplanning and they'll get that long before they would

get a new aircraft from Cirrus.

Yeah, I don't know

what Sears is at last time.

I heard two years this week.

I don't know if that's a true number or not.

But yeah, if you get a good, uh, used aircraft, you know, G1 through G3, you

know, go through the purchasing process.

It's going to take some time, you know, maybe a month or two.

You know, kind of the initial pains.

Um, you know, we could certainly have you up and running, new

aircraft, new avionics within six months probably without a problem.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

And you end up with such a beautiful aircraft.

Did you have to spearhead any STCs or anything like that to be able

to do these retrofits on these generations of Cirrus aircraft?

So now, so this is a, the nice part about this one.

So with the Saratoga, we had to do the entire STC.

Uh, this, uh, Garmin package.

It's all STC through Garmin.

So Garmin had their own SR22 and they went ahead and STC'd all the

products that were in this aircraft.

So it's been a nice transition for us to kind of take over a lot of those projects

and not have to start that STC process.

Oh, that makes it great for you guys.

Doesn't it?

Sure does.

Uh, anybody who's ever done an STC knows that it's, uh, you'll pull

your hair out doing it for sure.

Yeah.

So if we could circle, come back full circle back to this airplane.

Can you tell me a little bit about what you guys have done to it?

What about the engine?

What about the paint interior or anything like that?

What, What have you done to bring it into the state that it's in right now?

Sure.

So, uh, kind of our primary focus with this aircraft was the avionics.

So the paint, it was painted before we purchased it.

It's in a relatively good condition.

Uh, interior was in good condition, but certainly original.

And then the engine is a higher time engine, but running strong right now.

So, it's a pretty good aircraft.

We have used it a ton for a lot of testing and improvements

working with the guys at Garmin.

to try to make the product the best it can be.

Cool.

And if somebody, um, I imagine that if somebody brought you, um, maybe a

run out engine or, you know, paint, wasn't looking too good, that that

would be part of the process if they wanted to go with you as well.

So all that stuff, the paint, the engine, basically anything other than

avionics, um, is going to go through, uh, one of our partners that we work with.

We work with people around the country.

Um, we're great at avionics.

That's what we do.

That's what we stay doing.

So there are a bunch of guys we can list for engine work

and then paint for this year.

So there's really only one or two guys we know around the country

that do an outstanding job.

All right, but you would help coordinate that for a customer?

Oh, absolutely.

And, uh, so tell me what you're selling this airplane for,

um, a little bit about it.

What is the engine time?

And, um, you know, just what could somebody come and get

this from you for right now?

Sure.

So the airplane's being sold for 439, 000.

So a little over TBO.

So it was ironed, new cylinders were put on, but it wasn't a zero time overall.

It looks wonderful.

So yeah, it's certainly, it's not perfect.

It's 10 years old now.

It's hard to believe, but it's a, in good work.

Good It's a good looking condition.

So, and then the avionics were all done by us, so they were done in

2023, so all relatively new equipment.

Excellent.

Well, um, that would get somebody into a serious, um, I don't know,

40 percent of the cost of a new one.

Something like that.

Yeah.

Something like that.

I mean, even if you put in the motor into the mix, I guess you

could call it 50%, but I think it's pretty great bang for your buck when

you're out there looking for a good single engine travel and aircraft.

This aircraft is flown all over the country and it's Has never failed

us and has made good time doing it.

Awesome.

So, is there anything I didn't ask that I should have asked about next?

Or anything you want to talk about?

You know, I, I think we nailed it all.

I mean, we're, uh, we're just a large avionics shop on the East Coast just

outside of Boston and, uh, really love working on the Cirrus, but certainly

work on a lot of other airplanes, uh, from smaller piston aircraft all the

way through, uh, some of your smaller turboprop and turbofan aircraft.

Excellent.

I just love the concept of taking the older aircraft and kind of updating them,

bringing them to speed, giving them life.

This is even that old in the big scheme of things, but, but giving them, you

know, kind of the capabilities of a brand new aircraft at a fraction of the cost.

So I love what you guys are doing and I hope you keep

it up.

Yeah, we're enjoying it as well.

And just kind of keep it in mind that other than Cirrus, really no

one makes new aircraft anymore.

So it's an aging fleet out there.

We expect to continue rebuilds, not only as Cirrus aircraft, maybe on twin Cessna,

Bonanzas, King Airs, all those things.

Just because.

That fleet is aging and is in need of modernization.

Excellent.

Brian, thank you very much.

Appreciate the time.

Thank you.

Good luck.

So, what do you think.

He liked their approach.

How about the airplane?

Let me know or better yet.

If you're so inclined, give them a call.

If you're interested in doing something similar to your airplane, or if

you're going to want to do something like that to one you're acquiring.

But anyway, it was cool to catch up with Nexair and see what they're doing and

see that they're still going strong.

Wait.

Is that.

Posten strong.

I don't know I'm from the other side of the country, so maybe

I don't understand that Boston strong thing fully in any case.

They seem to still be up to their old tricks, to taking older

airplanes and making them new again.

Well, new-ish again.

I've got more stuff coming soon.

So stay subscribed and do, give me feedback on what you'd

like to know about Oshkosh.

The future of the podcast, my training episodes that are

coming up or anything else.

That you may want to hear about or know about.

As Talking to what my wife calls my imaginary friends, and she's

never really met many of them.

A lot of ideas pop up and this OSH is no different.

We've got some cool ideas of features, even some that could become

regular features of the podcast.

So we're brainstorming and working hard to get some of that going.

I'm excited where we're headed with the podcast, including the

training that'll be released shortly.

And I'm excited about the fledgling flight lane podcast too.

And we've got some stuff coming up there.

As well.

So if you haven't already.

Check that podcast out in your favorite podcast directory,

including apple podcasts, Spotify.

YouTube music, Amazon music, and many others, or come find

us@flightlinepodcast.com.

Technically speaking since this episode's content wasn't really aimed at learning or

student pilots or new ratings, et cetera.

It seems natural that it would have landed on the flight line podcast.

But I just loved the symmetry of publishing it here 15 years after the

original next era interview episode.

So there you go.

What can I say?

Both shows we'll have plenty coming.

So please subscribe to both.

It costs you nothing.

And you don't want to miss out on what's to come.

The FOMO is real.

My friends.

So don't suffer.

Subscribe.

noticed, I've mentioned watch or listen to the episode a couple of times.

This is one of those times that the audio and the video

episodes are exactly the same.

But they are both published.

So if you're listening to this and you want to see the airplane or Brian.

Nobody wants to see my radio face.

I'm sure.

Check out the video version of this episode on YouTube.

It's linked to and referenced in the show notes or on the student pilot cast website

entry for this episode, episode 71.

Which can be found@studentpilotcast.com slash 71.

Or you can just search for Nexair that's N E X a.

I are on the website search box and you'll find both episodes the

So let me know what you think.

course.

And as I said before, reach out with any feedback or suggestions or just

showering praise that works too.

You can send me a note at bill at student pilot, cast.com or dim meet.

ex.

At at bill well that's Bravo, India, Lima, Lima, whiskey, India, Lima.

And while I'm interested in a lot of things in aviation and I love

the focus, the technical nature, the learning, the teaching, the beauty.

The perspective, and even to some extent, the risks.

As that brings out the best in people, including me to

be as excellent as possible.

None of that happens without the hardware.

The flying machines that make this all possible.

So every once in awhile, we'll bring a feature like this one

that just have to do with that.

The machines that make it all possible.

The machines.

That allow me.

To be a pilot.