We recently acquired a legacy Sovereign and, after coming from an Excel, I’m surprised that other legacy Sovereign operators continue to operate with an archaic data loader system. With our Excel we converted from the old Zip disk to a USB loader. It was a welcome change and alleviated a lot of the corrupt data loads that came with Zip disks in general. I’ve been doing some research and Honeywell has a new data loader that is wifi/USB that could simply replace the old data loader currently in the Sovereign. Honeywell said the pinout between the old data loader and new data loader are the exact same, but it’s Cessna’s call on whether they put it in the Sovereign or not. I called Team Sovereign and the tech I talked to was aware of the data loader but hasn’t heard anything about Cessna implementing the loader into the legacy Sovereign.
I ask why? Over 300 legacy Sovereigns are in the fleet running a data loading system on an OS that isn’t even supported by Microsoft anymore. In a past life I did IT and if there is a technology that isn’t supported anymore you find a way to upgrade. The tech said that there hasn’t been enough calls into Team Sovereign about this. Below is the link to the Honeywell loader as well as Team Sovereign’s phone number.
https://aerospace.honeywell.com/en/products/cockpit-systems/wireless-data-loader-for-primus-epic
Team Sovereign - 1 (877) 683-7344
Aaron Lillibridge
Chief Pilot
HJ Martin/P & M Leasing