Dynon's SkyView HDX, the Certified STC, and the Day the Experimental Panel Was Allowed Into a Cessna That Actually Needed a Logbook

In 2016, Dynon Avionics earned a Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) to install its SkyView glass cockpit in a certified Cessna 172 - a panel developed in the experimental homebuilt world, now legal in the most common training airplane on the planet. That approval, paired with the FAA’s Part 23 rewrite that took effect in 2017, cracked open a certified-avionics retrofit market that had been closed to affordable technology for decades. For owners of aging certified airplanes, it turned a modern glass panel from a fantasy into a phone call.

Who Is Dynon and Why Certified Pilots Hadn’t Heard of Them

Dynon Avionics, based in Woodinville, Washington, spent most of its life in a different universe than the airplane you probably rent.

Aviation splits into two worlds when it comes to instruments. There’s the certified world - the Cessna 172 and Piper Cherokee - where every item bolted to the panel must carry an FAA blessing. And there’s the experimental world: amateur-built kit planes, the Van’s RV series, homebuilts, where the builder is the manufacturer and decides what goes in the panel.

Dynon built its entire business in that second universe, and got very good at it. While the certified world was still selling mechanical attitude indicators, Dynon was selling homebuilders a full glass cockpit - synthetic vision, a moving map, engine monitoring, and an integrated autopilot - on a bright touchscreen for a fraction of the certified price.

What the SkyView HDX Actually Does

The flagship product is the SkyView HDX. If you’ve only flown behind steam gauges, it’s a genuinely different experience: one or two side-by-side screens showing an artificial horizon painted over a three-dimensional picture of the terrain ahead, plus traffic, weather, and engine data in color. A cylinder starting to run hot shows up as a number changing in real time, instead of a surprise on the next oil analysis.

The safety case is rooted in how legacy instruments fail. A large share of gyroscopic instruments in the aging fleet fail slowly and quietly - a vacuum pump dies, the attitude indicator starts to lie, and in the clouds that has killed people.

Solid-state electronics don’t spin. There’s no vacuum pump. Attitude comes from tiny motion sensors - the same family of sensors in your phone - backed by a second independent battery and a second independent screen. That’s redundancy the original panel never had.

Why You Couldn’t Legally Install It in a Certified Cessna

For years, the answer to “if it’s that good and that cheap, why not put it in a normal airplane?” was one word: paperwork.

Here’s what most people miss about certified aviation. The rule isn’t that your equipment has to be good - it’s that your equipment has to be approved. Those are not the same thing. A SkyView could be safer, more reliable, and easier to read than the gyro it replaced, and still be illegal in a certified airplane because it lacked the specific FAA stamp.

Getting gear into a certified airplane generally requires a Supplemental Type Certificate (STC). Think of the airplane’s original type certificate as its birth certificate - the FAA’s sign-off on the design as the factory built it. An STC is the legal document saying you may change that design, in this specific way, on this specific list of airplanes.

Earning one is expensive and slow. You have to prove the modification is safe and document all of it, and that cost is why a lot of good technology never made the jump from experimental to certified.

The FAA Rule Change That Opened the Door

Around 2016, something shifted - and it wasn’t a product. It was a philosophy.

The FAA had been sitting on an uncomfortable data set. The general aviation fleet was aging, accident numbers weren’t improving, and much of the technology that could genuinely move those numbers - better attitude information, angle-of-attack indicators, engine monitoring - was sitting in the experimental market, cheap, mature, and proven over millions of hours. It just couldn’t legally cross the fence.

So the agency decided the old approval process had itself become a safety problem. If certifying a safety improvement was so expensive that nobody installed it, the process was costing lives - just slowly and off the books.

That thinking drove a rewrite of the small-airplane certification rules known as Part 23, which took effect in 2017. The old Part 23 was a thick book of specific prescriptions - build the wing spar exactly like this. The new one replaced much of that with performance-based standards: hit the safety target; we’re less concerned with dictating exactly how.

How the STC Grew Into a Fleet-Wide Approval

Dynon walked through that door first. Its 2016 STC to install SkyView in a certified Cessna 172 then expanded onto an Approved Model List (AML) - an STC that spreads to cover a whole roster of airplane models rather than a single type.

More Cessnas. Pipers. Beechcraft. The list keeps getting longer, model by model and approval by approval.

Why this matters for pilots: the AML is a living list. As of August 2026, coverage continues to expand, but it is different for every make, model, and serial range - which is exactly where the trade-offs live.

What It Costs and What You Give Up

The upside is genuine, starting with price. A certified glass installation from the traditional players could run well north of $20,000, and much more in a two-screen airplane. The Dynon path, depending on your airplane and shop, can come in at a serious fraction of that.

For the owner of a fifty-year-old trainer worth maybe $50,000 to $60,000, that gap is the entire difference between modernizing the airplane and flying it into the ground with the gyros it was born with. The capability - synthetic vision, a real digital autopilot with Dynon’s own servos, envelope awareness - is a category of safety the original panel never offered.

Now the honest downsides:

Coverage. An AML is a list. If your exact model and serial range isn’t on it, you’re out of luck until it is - no matter how similar your airplane looks to one that’s approved. Owners of oddball types have waited years for their tail number to make the cut.

Ecosystem lock-in. When you buy a panel, you’re marrying a company. The autopilot talks to the screen, the screen talks to the navigator, and they all must speak the same language. Dynon’s world works beautifully together - on Dynon’s terms. Mixing brands gets complicated fast, and that’s true no matter whose logo is on the glass.

The human network. The dominant player, Garmin, spent decades building a dealer and installer network so deep that in many towns, that’s simply who your avionics shop knows how to install and troubleshoot. A newer entrant builds that familiarity hangar by hangar. When something goes wrong at a field far from home, the question isn’t just whether the gear is good - it’s whether the shop there has ever seen it before.

Resale. The buyer of a used airplane often pays a premium for the name they recognize. The Dynon panel may be objectively excellent, but the used market prices familiarity, and a less common brand can leave value on the table at sale time - even when it flies identically.

What Dynon’s Move Set Off

The most important thing Dynon shipped may not have been the HDX at all. It was the proof of concept - evidence that the certified retrofit market could be cracked open by an outsider. And the giant noticed.

Garmin, which had largely owned the certified glass retrofit business, responded hard, bringing out lower-cost, lighter-weight certified displays aimed at the same airplanes, owners, and budgets. Suddenly the owner of a 1970s Cessna had real choices - plural - from real competitors, at prices that would have been science fiction fifteen years ago. That’s what competition looks like when a regulator gets out of its own way.

The Practical Move If You Own a Tired Panel

This wasn’t an overnight revolution. It started with one airplane type in 2016, built on a rule change that took years to land and took effect in 2017, and it’s still spreading right now.

If you own a certified airplane and you’re staring at a tired panel, the answer today isn’t a slogan - it’s a phone call. Ask your avionics shop one specific question: Is my exact airplane on the Approved Model List, and which systems are covered? The answer changes constantly and is different for every tail number.

The deeper lesson is about the regulator. For most of aviation history, we told ourselves certified meant safer and experimental meant risky. The SkyView story quietly demolished that. The gear from the so-called risky world turned out to be mature, reliable, and safe enough that the FAA didn’t just permit it - it decided that keeping it out was the more dangerous choice.

Key Takeaways

• Dynon Avionics earned a Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) in 2016 to install the SkyView glass cockpit in a certified Cessna 172, bringing experimental-world technology into certified airplanes.
• The FAA’s Part 23 rewrite, effective 2017, replaced rigid design prescriptions with performance-based safety standards, opening the door for affordable safety gear.
• Coverage spread via an Approved Model List (AML) now including Cessna, Piper, and Beechcraft models - but only for specific makes, models, and serial ranges.
• SkyView can cost a fraction of a traditional certified glass install that once ran well north of $20,000, while adding synthetic vision, a digital autopilot, and solid-state redundancy.
• Trade-offs remain: AML coverage gaps, ecosystem lock-in, a thinner installer network than Garmin’s, and potential resale drag from brand unfamiliarity.