Digital Autopilot Interface Reduces Maintenance Costs, Adds Safety And Reliability

The certification and availability of the EA100 Adapter for attitude-based autopilot systems was announced just a few minutes ago by Aspen Avionics, as an ANN crew was completing an illuminating visit to their production facility in Albuquerque, NM.

The EA100 provides a digital-to-analog data conversion between the EFD1000 and an aircraft’s attitude-based autopilot system. The adapter enables the Evolution Flight Display’s AHRS to provide accurate and reliable attitude information directly to the autopilot. Aspen customers now have the option to remove aging (and expensive) legacy attitude mechanical gyros when they install Evolution Flight Display Systems.

“The EA100 improves installed legacy autopilots by providing superior digital attitude information, effectively breathing new life into the aircraft’s automatic flight control system,” said Brad Hayden, Aspen’s Vice President of Marketing. “The EA100 Adapter has the added benefit of eliminating the expensive ongoing repair and overhaul costs associated with maintaining mechanical autopilot attitude gyros, like the Bendix/King KI-256.”

Aspen leverages the Evolution Flight Display system platform to offer safety enhancements over traditional mechanical or competing digital autopilot control systems.

In Evolution 2000 or Evolution 2500 Package systems, the EA100 can be installed to receive attitude input from both the EFD1000 Multi-function Flight Display and the EFD1000 Pro Primary Flight Display. The redundant AHRS sensors in these multi-display configurations provide dual AHRS inputs that can independently monitor autopilot performance. Aspen is the only avionics manufacturer to offer this level of autopilot integration and reliability.

The EA100 has the added capability to immediately disengage the autopilot if an AHRS fault is detected. This represents a safety improvement over legacy designs where an autopilot would continue to respond to attitude commands from the gyro, even if that gyro’s performance had become degraded or otherwise inoperative.

The first version of the EA100 will allow the replacement of the popular Bendix/King KI-256 attitude indicator and will support the KAP 100/200 series, the KFC 200 series, and other Bendix/King autopilots that require input from that model of gyro. Future versions of the EA100 Adapter will support additional Bendix/King, Collins, Cessna/ARC and Sperry autopilot systems.

The EA100 Adapter is available from Aspen Avionics authorized dealers and is priced at $2,495.00.

FMI: www.aspenavionics.com