Touchscreen Flight Deck Available For Large Jets

Garmin announced Monday that it is developing a revolutionary, integrated flight deck for the Part 25 business jet market. The Garmin G5000 is designed specifically for crew-flown turbine aircraft and combines a dual multi-sensor flight management system (FMS), touchscreen vehicle management units, and multi-pane cockpit displays. These widescreen displays with touchscreen controls give pilots more useful information at their fingertips than ever before such as worldwide weather, Garmin’s synthetic vision technology (SVT), aircraft synoptics, electronic flight charts, and more.

“We’re eager to serve the Part 25 market and are confident that our fully integrated flight deck and award-winning customer support will exceed the expectations of flight departments and aircraft manufacturers in this segment,” said Gary Kelley, vice president of marketing. “Like other Garmin products, the G5000’s architecture is designed with future growth and technologies in mind. Customers and aircraft manufacturers will be able to add significant capabilities to the system in the future, often without requiring additional hardware.”

The G5000 features WXGA high resolution, wide aspect ratio (12-inch or 14-inch diagonal) primary flight displays (PFD) and multi-function displays (MFD). Because the G5000 is scalable, aircraft manufacturers can choose as many displays as cockpit real estate will allow. The landscape oriented screens have multi-pane display capability that allows multiple pages to be viewed side-by-side on any of the screens. Therefore, pilots can simultaneously view maps, charts, checklists and aircraft systems synoptics, TAWS, TCAS, flight planning, weather or video input pages.

Combining and leveraging the experience gained from designing and delivering automotive consumer products as well as integrated avionic flight decks, the G5000 has a vehicle management system with an infrared touchscreen interface that is easy to understand and use – pilots simply touch what they want to change. The vehicle  management system has a desktop-like menu interface with intuitive icons, audio and visual feedback, and animation so that pilots know exactly how the system is responding  to their input. The touchscreen also enhances ease of use through  common sense functions like “back” and “home” that let pilots quickly retrace their steps or return to the home screen. The vehicle management system also incorporates conventional controls at the bottom of the display.

The G5000 integrated flight deck is expected to satisfy the global operational requirements of emerging NextGen and SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) initiatives. The G5000 includes a three-axis, fully digital, dual channel, fail passive autoflight system, and has the ability to provide tightly integrated auto-throttle capability. It also has the features pilots have come to expect in this class of aircraft such as wide area augmentation system (WAAS) technology that enables GPS-guided LPV “glidepath” approaches to ILS-comparable minimums without reliance upon ground-based navaids.

Additionally, the G5000 has planned growth to provide RNP procedures, including RNP SAAAR (required navigation performance special aircraft and aircrew authorization required).

Displayed on the G5000’s widescreens, Garmin’s SVT presents near life-like 3D depictions of terrain, obstacles, traffic and the runway environment so that the image on the display replicates what pilots would see outside the cockpit on a clear day. SVT works seamlessly to alert pilots of potential ground hazards by displaying terrain and obstacles which pose a threat to the aircraft with appropriate TAWS alert coloring, as well as voice alerts. SVT also includes the ability to display pathways (or Highway-In-The-Sky) that are depicted as 3D “flying rectangles” and help pilots stay on course when flying en route legs, VNAV legs, GPS/WAAS vertical approach procedures, ILS approach procedures, and arrival and departure procedures.

The G5000 also includes many other situational awareness and safety of flight features that Part 25 operators will consider essential:

• Active and passive traffic surveillance functionality using advanced TCAS II/ACAS II technology and featuring patent-pending Garmin ADS-B target correlation and tracking for industry-leading traffic management and airspace monitoring.
• Advanced weather detection and avoidance technology.
• Optional Iridium-based worldwide satellite weather datalink access.
• XM WX Satellite Weather for U.S. and Canada provides a variety of real time weather data such as NEXRAD, METAR, lightning, winds aloft, echo tops and more.
• Integrated synoptics (graphical systems displays) to help simplify monitoring and.control of aircraft systems and aid in troubleshooting of system problems that.might arise.
• Optional Electronic Stability and Protection system (Garmin ESP™) works to assist.the pilot in maintaining the aircraft in a safe, flight stable condition.
• Supports a “paperless flight deck” concept with display capability for electronic charts, flight manual data and more.
• Voice/data communications supported by digital radios and SATCOM datalink will provide future growth capability.
• Supports simplified database management via flyGarmin.com.
• The ability to display video from a third party forward looking infrared (FLIR) camera or other video sources for enhanced vision system (EVS) or live-cam video monitoring.

 
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The G5000 will be supported by Garmin’s aviation customer support team that provides 24/7 worldwide support. Garmin expects to receive Technical Standard Orders (TSO) certification of the new G5000 system in 2012. Cessna Aircraft Company is the first aircraft manufacturer to announce selection of the G5000 for a Citation business jet.

FMI: www.garmin.com