Visitors to the Rockwell Collins booth at Heli-Expo will be able to fly the company’s new Pro Line Fusion avionics demonstrator. “We’re taking another step forward to build an offering around Pro Line Fusion that can cover multiple segments of the civil rotary market and multiple missions for civil helicopters based on years of helicopter experience in government markets,” said Andrew Jetton, Rockwell Collins manager of global strategic marketing for civil rotary wing.
The Pro Line Fusion demonstrator is equipped with a collective and cyclic. This flight deck is intended primarily for twin-engine helicopters (Part 27 and 29) and thus has features optimized for two-pilot cockpits. “The copilot is there as a mission assistant,” Jetton said, “who can make greater use of the touchscreens, setting waypoints, pulling up charts, etc. The touchscreen lets them do that more efficiently. The pilot-in-command may not be touching the screens at that point.”
There are other benefits to touchscreens as well, and these have to do with design of the pilot-avionics interface. Many avionics manufacturers, for example, are eliminating the traditional FMS control-display unit (CDU) in favor of simpler and more intuitive touchscreen controls. “It isn’t just about reaching out and touching the PFD,” said Jetton, “but what can you do with all the controls in the center console today? The capabilities of Pro Line Fusion allow us to take some functions like the FMS CDU and radios and virtualize them on a touchscreen. We’re cleaning up the look and feel of the cockpit, which reduces the number of LRUs and wiring and makes the system more software-driven. It makes changing things more easy.”
Pro Line Fusion engineers and designers are working with helicopter operators and pilots to determine the best way to apply touchscreens for new commercial helicopters. “Making touchscreens isn’t a challenge,” Jetton said. “It’s really a question of the software that’s enabled by the touchscreens and what is the allocation of tasks for this environment for the phase of flight or between the PFD and the console or nav displays. The real thing touchscreens give you is the ability to ‘touch what you want to change.’ If you want to change something, look where the information is displayed, and you’re able to touch that and tell it what to change. Rather than look down, look through a menu and enter keystrokes. [It’s based on the] phase of flight and what function makes sense, versus traditional avionics.
