Aviation Week & Space Technology - 3 November 2014

(Axel Boer) #1
48 AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/NOVEMBER 3/10, 2014 AviationWeek.com/awst

John Croft Orlando, Florida

Universal Upgrades


Avionics maker jumps forward


with InSight flight deck


U


niversal Avionics is about to cer-
tify a new flight deck that tight-
ens the working relationship be-
tween pilot and machine with a blend of
higher-resolution 3-D synthetic vision,
larger displays and new icon-based
command-and-control architecture.
Called InSight, the system is the
first major integrated cockpit refresh
in nearly a decade from the company
that first certified synthetic vision for
the multifunction display in 2002, for
light airplane (Part 23) primary flight
displays in 2005 and for air transport
(Part 25) cockpits in 2006. The first-
generation product was rudimentary
by today’s standards, however, with
lower-resolution graphics, no on-screen
graphical flight-planning capabilities,
no runways represented on the 3-D for-
ward views and no split-screen options.
With InSight, by contrast, all the
modern features and high-resolution
databases have been brought up to
date and “future-proofed” with the
addition of wireless access. Universal
expects to certify the fixed-wing ver-
sion in dual-pilot configuration in its
Cessna Citation VII flight-test aircraft
in mid-2015. The company will hold the
supplementary type certificate (STC)
for the broader Citation Model 650 se-
ries, making it available to its dealer

network for retrofits, and it is eyeing
other Part 25 aircraft.
“We learned a lot from 10 years of
flat-panel retrofits and forward-fits in
30 different certifications,” says Dan
Reida, vice president of sales for Uni-
versal. “We went back to the drawing
board to improve on what we had and
remain innovative. We’ve succeeded
with InSight.” Reida says the company
did not pick the dual-pilot Citation VII
“because there was a huge market,” but
because it met the needs for the initial
certification of the InSight system in a
Part 25 aircraft.
Aviation Week observed the new
cockpit in action on a round-robin flight
from Orlando Executive Airport north-
ward to Tallahassee on Oct. 18 in the
Citation VII with Universal senior test
flight test pilot Joel Glunt and business
development manager and pilot Carey
Miller. One initial surprise for a new-
model flight deck is that there are no
installed touchscreen devices, an option
competitors are increasingly using to
augment the human-machine connec-
tion. At the request of its customer
base, Universal took a countercultural
approach with InSight, however, in that
practically all interactions between pi-
lot and machine are carried out on the
pedestal behind the throttle quadrant

using a flush-mount cursor control,
two push buttons, a keypad and knob
or two. The only touchscreen capability
in the near term will be between a pilot’s
portable iPad and an onboard router to
load flight plans into the flight manage-
ment system, an option that Universal
plans to make available sometime after
the initial certification next year.
“We took a very serious look at
[touch],” says Reida. “But with the typi-
cal customer in the [Part 25] markets
we serve, we decided not to go there.
For those aircraft, it can be difcult to
access touchscreens. We also have a
customer base that flies using gloves,
and we didn’t want to shut them out.”

Consistent with the philosophy,
there are no bezel buttons or touch-
screen capabilities in the Citation’s
four 10.4-in displays in portrait format,
which are larger than the 8.9-in. dis-
plays for Vision-1, the first-generation
system. InSight has an Ethernet-based
architecture that results in fewer line-
replaceable units and more processing
carried out on commercially available
displays hardened to aircraft standards
by Universal.
The enhancements have allowed the
company to cut the price of the new
EFI-1040 display to 60% of the cost
of the 8.9-in. EFI-890; a three-display
system starts at $250,000 for aircraft
with a Universal flight management
system (FMS) and a typical autopilot,
says Reida. Universal continues to build
and support the EFI-890 at its Tucson,
Arizona, facility.
“We still have programs in the early
stages [with the EFI-890],” Reida says.
Along with business aircraft, Vision-1
is installed in special-mission aircraft
and some regional airliners, including
Air Iceland Bombardier Dash 8s.
Glunt put me in the right seat of the
Citation VII cockpit on the ground at
Orlando Executive to demonstrate the
features of the cockpit. Initial boot-up
of the system took more than 5 min.
due to the alignment needs of the leg-
acy attitude heading reference system
(AHRS), a component Universal kept
with the cockpit to keep costs down.
Other original equipment included the
air data computers, autopilot, crew
alerting system and standby instru-

NEXT-GENERATION AVIONICS

Universal Avionics flight test pilot
Joel Glunt uses the 3-D exocentric
vision feature of InSight to help with
taxiing at Orlando Executive Airport.

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