Building the panel on the Jabiru J250 with solid-state circuit breakers. By Bob Fritz.

By Bob Fritz

After 30 years as a mechanical design engineer in Silicon Valley, I’ve become sufficiently aware of the distance between idea and execution. That’s a fancy way of saying that I know what I don’t know and rely on friends who are experts in a given field.

That said, I was dissatisfied with the mechanical appearance and last-century technology of a circuit breaker. The pull-type circuit breakers in my wife’s Cessna 172 have a few problems: They collect smut around them, they don’t match, they wear out, they take up too much panel space, they’re spread out so that working on the back of the panel is a pain, and they cost about $20 each. Other than that, they’re great. …

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