Compact 8" PFD4000 Joins Massive 15" Systems From Avidyne -- With Synthetic Vision!
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.
Copyright 2008, Aero-News Network, Inc., ALL Rights Reserved.
FMI: www.avidyne.com
