Genesys With New Digital Autopilot For Light GA

Genesys, the Mineral Wells, Texas, company that makes the S-TEC line of autopilots, announced at Oshkosh AirVenture on Monday its new S-TEC 3100 digital autopilot that provides a tremendous amount of capability compared with legacy autopilots for this class of plane, including the remarkably popular rate-based units built by S-TEC for hundreds of models of airplanes over the past few decades. Those autopilots were once the only economically feasible way for owners of light GA planes to put flight control systems in their planes.

Courtesy of Genesys Aerosystems

The 3100 goes beyond those systems, providing far superior features and, presumably, performance (we plan to flight test the system as soon as possible) at a price point that will be competitive with its legacy products. The comparable product in S-TEC's lineup is the 55X flight control computer. The popular rate-based autopilot was standard equipment in thousands of Cirrus SR22 and SR20 aircraft before Cirrus transitioned to the Garmin G1000-based panel several years ago.

The 3100 is an all-digital autopilot that boasts boast envelope protection and a straight and level button, as have become popular on Genesys' competitors autopilots, as well as advanced autopilot features, including fully coupled approaches (both WAAS and radio-nav based), indicated airspeed and vertical speed hold, altitude hold and capture, course intercept and more. The company expects certification for the system in early 2018 with the first models slated for STCs including the Cessna 182, Cessna 210, Beechcraft Bonanza and Piper Saratoga.

Genesys plans to announce firm pricing on the autopilot soon, but it does say that it will be price competitive with Garmin's recently announced GFC 600, which has a list price of between around $20,000 and $24,000, for the high-performance aircraft that Garmin is targeting with initial STC programs.

Learn more at Genesys Aerosystems.

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Isabel GoyerWriter

A commercial pilot, editor-in-Chief Isabel Goyer has been flying for more than 40 years, with hundreds of different aircraft in her logbook and thousands of hours. An award-winning aviation writer, photographer and editor, Ms. Goyer led teams at Sport Pilot, Air Progress and Flying before coming to Plane & Pilot in 2015.