Two-year warranty
Our products are warranted against any defect of material, manufacture or design for two years from delivery at our premises. The remedy provided is replacement of the defective unit.
// LIFE CYCLE
What happens when a component disappears.
An aircraft flies for twenty or thirty years. An electronic component lives for five to ten. In between sits the work nobody mentions at the kick-off meeting, and it decides the life of your installation. Here is how we handle it, what our conditions of sale say, and what we need from you for it to hold.
- Contractual warranty
- 2 years
- Oldest units in service
- 2006
- Systems followed
- 1,100+
- Identification
- by serial number
// THE PROBLEM
The aircraft's calendar is not the electronics' calendar.
When you specify a recorder, you commit an installation for the length of the programme. Three deadlines concern you, and none of them is yours to set.
- 1
Component availability. A converter, a memory or a connector can leave its manufacturer's catalogue without anything changing in your need. It is the most frequent cause of a board redesign.
- 2
Product availability. An option, a cartridge capacity or a whole model can leave our catalogue, because of upstream obsolescence or a change in regulation, as happened with lithium battery legislation.
- 3
Reading the data. A recording made today has to stay readable in ten years, with software that will run on a machine that does not exist yet.
// WHAT IS WRITTEN
What our conditions of sale say.
Better said before the order than discovered in a dispute. Three clauses of our general conditions of sale bear directly on the life cycle.
Equivalents without prior notice
We reserve the right to use, without prior notice, material of equivalent specification, to secure our supplies or to lessen the impact of an obsolescence. That is what lets us keep delivering a part number when a component disappears, instead of closing the line.
No third-party repair
Unless agreed in writing, a unit presumed defective must not be opened or repaired by you or by a third party: the warranty would lapse, and above all the qualification of the unit could no longer be demonstrated.
A modification or an improvement to our products creates no obligation to carry it back to units already delivered. What you received stays what your order defined, and that is a protection too: your configuration does not change under your feet.
// AT DESIGN STAGE
Pushing the problem back from the first schematic.
Obsolescence is treated as a design risk, not as a production incident. Four choices, made once, that are expensive to undo later.
Components chosen to last
At equal performance, a component with a long industrial life cycle comes before a consumer part. It is a selection criterion like power consumption or temperature range.
Everything designed here
Electronics, programmable logic, software and mechanics are developed in house. Redesigning a board therefore depends neither on an outside design office having capacity nor on an IP vendor's goodwill.
A laboratory next to the design office
Our environmental test facilities are on site. An equivalent is requalified here, on the same benches as the original definition, without waiting for a slot in an external laboratory.
Traceable modifications
Change control is part of our EN 9100 quality system: an evolution goes through a review, a documented decision and an updated definition, before manufacture.
// THE PROCESS
When a part disappears.
The same sequence every time, whether it is a passive component or a complete option.
- 1
Detection
Watching components and technologies is part of the design office's daily work. An end-of-production notice therefore surfaces before the break, not when the stock is empty.
- 2
Equivalent
The part is replaced by a form, fit and function equivalent. The wording matters: the aim is that the unit stays interchangeable with those already in service.
- 3
Requalification
The equivalent is qualified against the original definition, on our own test facilities. This is not an equivalence on paper, it is an equivalence demonstrated.
- 4
Product notice
If the change affects how the product is ordered or operated, it is published as a product notice on the Support page, with a last-time-buy date when relevant. If the change is invisible to you, it does not clutter your desk.
Two real cases, published
The iRIPS internal battery option, out of the catalogue since 2020
Legislation on rechargeable lithium batteries changed. Rather than maintain an option that had become difficult to ship and to certify, it was withdrawn, and the energy reserve is now handled at aircraft level. The notice explains what to do about units already fitted with one.
SSD cartridge part-number coding, in force since 2022
The way a cartridge part number is composed changed. Older references stay readable and the decoder accepts them, but an order placed with the old coding would no longer mean the same thing.
// UNITS IN SERVICE
What happens to a unit already delivered.
We follow every unit by its serial number, from manufacture to the fleet it serves. That is what makes everything below possible.
It comes back when it must
A fault, a repair, a firmware update or a calibration check all follow the same return procedure. A unit that comes back is identified, diagnosed and put back to its definition.
It stays supported as long as it flies
The oldest units our records still identify in customer fleets were delivered in 2006, the year our records begin. No end-of-support date is set in advance: service decides, not the calendar.
Its data stays readable
The replay software keeps opening older formats: the release history is public, and a recent version even made readable a family of videos that earlier versions could not decode.
Its reliability figures are available
A reliability prediction, the MTBF computed in a given environment, exists per product and is supplied on request. It is a figure for comparing designs and sizing spares, not a commitment on one particular unit.
The return and calibration procedure → The software release history → Read a configuration part number →
// ON YOUR SIDE
Three things that help us follow you for a long time.
They cost nothing at the request-for-quotation stage and save months later.
Tell us the programme horizon
Twenty years of service is not specified like a six-month campaign. Knowing the horizon lets us flag the sensitive points during the study, while they can still be handled by a design choice.
Ask for a last-time-buy quotation
If your programme needs identical spares over its life, a last-time-buy batch is quoted while the line is open. That is simpler than requalifying an equivalent in a hurry.
Keep the configuration part number
The full part number of your unit states what it contains. Keep it in your file: it lets you order the same again, and lets you know years later what was delivered.
A question about a unit in service?
Give us the serial number or the part number: we will tell you what we know about it, what is still available, and what has changed since delivery.
Write to support →