Originally Posted by L39 Guy
- it is interesting to note that a brand new, certified WAAS receiver from Garmin is about $14K; upgrading an existing box to WAAS is $3K. Why Honeywell and the others can't do it for something similar (or even double) is beyond me.
Maybe off topic, but the cost is largely NRE (development cost). From working in the electronics industry on even smaller product developments, without the same reliability / robustness targets as aviation, the development costs can be pretty big.
For a general aviation Garmin box, the manufacturing cost is sub $1K. The rest is engineering work.
The market is much smaller for commercial airline avionics. They are going to sell/upgrade between 1000 and 10,000 units (at a guess) for any given product. Those have pretty high standards for reliability/certification and a lot of integration with other a/c systems.
If you add up the engineering work (design, verification, certification) and divide it across the possible market, and add probably not a small amount of liability insurance, those cost figures are probably not unreasonable.