While it might seem that avionics design had reached a plateau with few significant advances, this year has seen some interesting developments from new integrated touchscreen flight decks to the practical application of artificial intelligence and the proliferation of autothrottles in smaller airplanes.

Integrated Flight Decks

Garmin announced its latest integrated flight deck—G3000 Prime—just before this year’s NBAA-BACE in October. For many years, Garmin has employed touchscreens as avionics controllers and more recently has offered touchscreen main displays with its TXi avionics. Now, the G3000 Prime flight deck is bringing touchscreens to integrated flight decks with 14-inch edge-to-edge touch displays in the primary and multifunction display positions and improved pilot interfaces that make the system even easier for pilots to manage.

With G3000 Prime, the screens are now called primary display units (PDUs). The current Garmin touch controllers are replaced by secondary display units (SDUs), and these have 40% more screen area than the original controllers. Now the SDUs are all standby-capable, eliminating the need for separate standby instruments.

On both the PDUs and SDUs, the capacitive-touch displays recognize when a hand is resting on the display and still allow fingers to manipulate the screen simultaneously, which makes interacting with the displays easier in turbulence. There are no knobs on the SDUs, but there is a new Garmin control unit (GCU 315) under each secondary display with physical knobs and buttons. The GCU enables navigation through applications, zooming of windows, pane focus on the PDUs, and radio tuning.

Textron Aviation became the first airframer to announce the adoption of G3000 Prime at NBAA-BACE, and this will be in the Citation CJ4 Gen3.

Honeywell’s new Anthem avionics suite made significant progress this year, including logging hundreds of flight hours in the company’s Pilatus PC-12 testbed. Designed for a variety of aviation segments, from Part 23 to 25 general aviation aircraft and commercial airliners to military aircraft, Anthem is a platform that could introduce new pilots flying training aircraft to Anthem’s operating philosophy. They might then graduate to different types or larger aircraft equipped with the familiar Anthem interface.

In the flight test PC-12, the Anthem setup includes three touch-display units (TDUs). Two pilot interface display units (PIDUs) are mounted in front of the center console, underneath the center TDU. Each TDU can host a page that looks exactly like the PIDU, called a pilot interface window (PIW), so all the functions that control Anthem are available on any display. Airframers that select Anthem can opt for a cursor-control device as an alternative to all-touch interfaces.

The PIW is the primary interface that pilots will use to manage Anthem, and its touchscreen has all the buttons for operating radios, planning a flight, and pulling up systems synoptics. At the bottom of the PIW is probably the most unique feature of Anthem: the multiple data field or smart scratchpad, which Honeywell calls the predictive user interface.

Scratchpads are a common design feature on FMSs, allowing users to input, say, a frequency and then select which radio will be assigned that frequency. The Honeywell User Experience (HUE) design team took the scratchpad further into the future and made it much more useful. Touching the scratchpad enables the user to input various types of data, and the scratchpad automatically recognizes the data type and prepares it for proper placement.

Autothrottles

Recognition of the safety and operational benefits of autothrottles is growing, and airframers are adding these to smaller airplanes. The most recent addition was Honda Aircraft’s HondaJet Elite II, while more of Textron Aviation’s Garmin G3000-equipped CitationJets are equipped with or adding autothrottles. Turboprops such as the Beechcraft King Air 260 and 360 include factory-standard autothrottles (made by Innovative Solutions & Support), while the newest versions of the Pilatus PC-12 and Daher TBM 960 are autothrottle-equipped. Many of these airplanes support Garmin’s Autoland capability, which requires autothrottles.

AI Avionics Are Real

Eclipse Aerospace has begun test-flying Daedalean AI’s visual awareness system in an Eclipse 550 twinjet, testing the system’s artificial intelligence (AI)-based capabilities for detect-and-avoid traffic deconfliction. Ultimately, Daedalean’s visual awareness system will offer the traffic capability, as well as landing guidance and navigation in GPS-denied environments. Daedalean's Visual Positioning System uses cameras to determine aircraft position, along with a Visual Motion Unit to calculate the distance and direction that the aircraft is flying, updated by the positioning system’s camera-based visual references.

One of the first products that could result from Daedalean’s AI efforts is a Part 23 supplemental type certificate (STC) for its PilotEye visual traffic detection system in partnership with Avidyne. The company is also developing a similar traffic system, Ailumina Vista (for Part 27 rotorcraft), and working on an EASA STC.

At NBAA-BACE, Universal Avionics demonstrated its AI-driven system that uses external camera inputs, audio capture, and ADS-B In information to paint a picture for the pilot of the situation at the airport while taxiing. The AI system uses Universal’s FAA-certified Aperture visual management system, which delivers video inputs and imagery to flight deck displays and head-up displays (HUDs), including Universal’s SkyLens head-wearable display (HWD).

The AI application for the Aperture product is image content analysis, using data captured from sensors such as Universal’s EVS-5000 multi-spectral camera mounted on the nose for HUDs and HWDs, as well as external cameras, and audio captured from the aircraft’s communications radios. The AI system can isolate and ingest com radio audio and it knows which instructions are for its aircraft.

For example, if a controller clears that aircraft for takeoff, the AI system recognizes the registration number that the controller uses in radio calls to the pilot. Any other communications to other aircraft can safely be ignored because they are for different aircraft. Once the AI captures the controller’s message, it is displayed in text on the upper right side of the display (either head-down on an instrument panel display or head-up on a HUD or HWD). The text annotation is backed up by a graphic depiction on the display showing a line for the taxi route and a flashing white line at the runway threshold to indicate a “hold short” instruction.

The view will also show other objects such as aircraft identified by their call sign or registration number and ground vehicles to help improve the pilot’s situational awareness. Once cleared for takeoff, the horizontal line at the threshold disappears. 

The pilot can still see other traffic on the head-down display, HUD, or HWD, even if it is obscured visually by inclement weather, thanks to ADS-B In, and it is easy to match that traffic with the display of its call sign via incoming radio calls.