It's been an interesting year for a renewed and reinvigorated
Avidyne. Avidyne Corporation had a message for pilots,
manufacturers, and the general aviation industry as a whole, at
AirVenture 2008: the company's back, and anyone who had written
them off should take notice.
After ceding much of the GA glass panel market -- a market
pretty much Avidyne created, with its Envision flight deck -- to
rival Garmin, Avidyne knew it had to offer a knockout punch in
order to stand any chance of regaining market share. The avionics
manufacturer has done it by combining Synthetic Vision (SVS) and
Enhanced Vision (EVS) with large-format 15-inch Integrated Flight
Displays (IFDs).
Avidyne says its Entegra SVS offers improvements over existing
systems by depicting 3D terrain all the way out to the horizon,
based on the aircraft's altitude above the ground. The Avidyne
system also depicts obstacles, traffic and "Highway-in-the-Sky"
(HITS) boxes on the PFD, enhancing the utility of the airplane,
improving the comfort level of passengers, and increasing the
safety of each flight.
As demonstrated on Avidyne's massive new 15" IFD8000 PFDs, the
company builds on that capability by offering Entegra EVS enhanced
vision, using a Max-Viz EVS-100 infrared camera. EVS is designed to
turn night into day, enabling pilots to see up to ten times further
in marginal VFR conditions through most atmospheric obscurations.
With SVS and EVS, pilots can now fly comfortably at night, enjoying
clear views of the ground, seeing emergency landing fields, roads,
lakes, and buildings.
Avidyne also introduced the Entegra
PFD4000, a new compact, 8-inch primary flight display system, at
AirVenture 2008. The panel is designed to fit virtually any general
aviation aircraft, adding the enhanced situational awareness and
reliability of an all-glass flight deck.
The PFD4000 is designed as a "6-pack" replacement that will fit
in virtually any panel space and offers traditional primary flight
instrumentation, including support for autopilot and flight
director as well as altitude pre-select, vertical speed select and
heading select modes.
Just like the Entegra EXP5000, it's bigger brother, the PFD4000
has a wide-format artificial horizon, intuitive trend tapes for
altitude, airspeed, and vertical speed, a full horizontal situation
indicator (HSI) with moving map presentation of flight plan data
and an RMI/Bearing pointer overlay, as well as a full-time wind
vector -- all within the pilot's primary field of view.
The PFD4000 also offers one-button access to frequent pilot
settings such as altitude, vertical speed, and heading, as well as
a dedicated BARO knob, make it easy to use. It is designed to have
a learning curve of less than five minutes.Avidyne says the PFD4000
will be "competitively" priced, and available sometime in 2009.
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