The new generation of flight decks, such as Honeywell’s Anthem, are designed for connectivity and autonomy.
An all-new flight deck avionics platform only comes around every decade or so, and Honeywell is poised to announce more applications for its Anthem system, which entered flight testing in May on a company-owned Pilatus PC-12.
The first announced applications for the system are a trio of electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) air taxis from Lilium, Supernal and Vertical Aerospace, but the core tenets of Anthem—connectivity and autonomy—are recurring themes across the avionics industry.
The nascent advanced air mobility (AAM) industry has acted as a catalyst for new avionics development with its desire to develop aircraft that are simple to fly with a single pilot but that integrate propulsion and flight control in new ways and provide a pathway to eventual autonomy.
Honeywell made an early commitment to AAM, developing a compact fly-by-wire system and detect-and-avoid radar as well as the Anthem cockpit. Garmin is also active in the market and its G3000 flight deck has been selected by Archer and Joby for their eVTOLs and by Beta Technologies for its electric conventional-takeoff-and-landing and eVTOL aircraft.
Garmin’s G5000 flight deck for Part 25 transport-category aircraft has been chosen by Swedish startup Heart Aerospace for its 30-seat electric regional airliner, the ES-30, which will use Honeywell’s fly-by-wire system. Avidyne’s new Quantum flight deck has been selected by Japanese startup SkyDrive for its eVTOL and France’s VoltAero for its hybrid-electric Cassio 330 fixed-wing aircraft. Quantum is an open-architecture platform that enables aircraft manufacturers to build a custom avionics system using off-the-shelf and new components.
Skyryse is a U.S. startup developing an aircraft-agnostic integrated flight operating system that combines triplex-redundant fly-by-wire with a touch screen pilot interface. The first applications are retrofit of the Robinson R66 and Airbus H125/H130 light helicopters but the PC-12 is also to be upgraded under Skyryse’s partnership with air medical service operator Air Methods.
How this new generation of avionics platforms could be expanded in the future is becoming clearer. Avidyne, for example, its working with Swiss autonomous piloting startup Daedalean to develop the PilotEye computer-vision situational awareness system. This is on track to become the first system based on neural-network machine learning (ML) to achieve certification.
Under an EU-funded project called Darwin, a Honeywell-led team is working on ML-based automation of cockpit and flight operations. The goal is to develop digital assistance to reduce workload and increase collaboration as an enabler first for extended minimum crew operation then single-pilot operations and eventually fully autonomous flight.
