Interview With Dan Schwinn Of Avidyne, Part V of VI

• Read Part One
• Read Part Two
• Read Part Three
• Read Part Four

In July of this year, we sat down in a conference room at Avidyne's Bedford, MA headquarters with Avidyne's President, Dan Schwinn. In a wide-ranging interview we discussed Avidyne's products, some of its future plans and possibilities, and a bit of the future of GA in general.

In the first two parts of the interview, Dan proudly described the range of Avidyne's OEM customers and told us how a recent flight -- as a passenger -- in an Avidyne-equipped plane taught him how Avidyne users are taking advantage of the capabilities of the datalink system in ways even he hadn't expected.

The next two parts gave up the inside scoop on how Avidyne turned to a savvy old airline captain when it was first integrating radar with its systems, and how Avidyne is working with Eclipse Aviation on the most integrated aircraft in GA history -- maybe in the history of all aviation. Dan also gives his view of LSA.

And in this part, Dan talks about some future issues. Will we see Avidyne taking on Rockwell Collins ProLine 21, Honeywell, Thales in heavy GA? Why or why not? Avidyne in Space? What's the next coming thing, the integrated cockpit? What does that mean?

We'd left off when Dan had explained that Avidyne wasn't immediately planning to market anything for the light-sport end of aviation, but that they watched the market closely -- "that's where people begin."

Aero-News: So, we're not immediately going any further downmarket, but if I were one of the big, Honeywell-type fish, that was putting stuff in Gulfstreams or Challengers, I'd be concerned about where Avidyne was going.

Dan: You know, it's probably easier to go upmarket than downmarket. It's probably easier if you have a big volume base, to work from there.

But one of the things that has become really clear to me, in the last couple of years as we've moved up, working on Adam and Eclipse -- to a lot of us light general aviation pilots, we look at an Eclipse, let's say, and we look at a Gulfstream 350, their latest new product. We look at it, and we say, well the screens are a little bit bigger, but it's all the same stuff. Keep the greasy side down, navigate the same airspace, got airspeed, and... stuff. What's the big difference?

There are a lot of big differences. And that's what I've come to learn.

First of all, the certification levels, when you cross from Part 23 to Part 25, are very significant. The second thing is, that almost every system is more sophisticated on those larger aircraft, than it is on lighter aircraft. And let me give you a couple for-examples.

Aero-News: Please do!

Dan: Our attitude determination system meets the TSO requirement. That is the exact same TSO requirement for a 172 you want to fly IFR, to a Boeing triple-seven you want to fly IFR. However, as you go upstream, at some point, these aircraft, in order to they're built, they're designed in a fashion so that they're perhaps not as totally intrinsically stable as light general aviation airplanes.

And therefore the autopilots have to be much higher-performance. In order to be higher-performance, they have to have a better sensor system driving them. An incredibly precise AHARS, that's much better than the TSO requirement.

Beyond that, if you're flying transoceanic, most GPSes can figure out where you are, but what these airplanes have on 'em is [INS]. You know, an inertial navigation system is an AHARS that you integrate. Right? So it's like dead reckoning. By electronics.

By going in a straight line, and --

Aero-News: -- the gyroscope has felt this, and --

Dan: Yeah, and I'm gonna end up over there, right? So that's just dead reckoning in electronics.

If you integrate the output of our AHARS, over hours, it's not going to be very accurate. You're going to be off by miles and miles and miles over where you really are.

Whereas, on a large aircraft, those inertial navigation systems, you integrate the output of their AHARS over hours and hours and hours, and you're off by, you know, a thousand feet.

Aero-News: But that's an extremely costly component of the system, because of the precision with which it's manufactured.

Dan: Right. So you can see two different levels here. You can see at our level, we meet the TSO requirements. A pilot can't tell 1/100th of a degree accuracy, you know -- it works great. But as you go up, in order to have a high-performing autopilot on a regional jet, you need a better-performing [AHARS]. And then, if you want to fly on inertial [nav], you've got to be better still.

So, that's an example, just picking one of the sensors, of how, if you go upstream, things get somewhat more sophisticated, and way, way, way more expensive.

Aero-News: And, of course, the volume goes down. The cost goes up. All that feeds on itself.

Dan: That's right.

So, if you were to go across the systems in the airplane, you'd have a similar story on many of the systems. Take traffic. Well, a lot of guys fly, "see and avoid." But then you've got TIS. If you didn't have TIS you'd have TASS, like a Skywatch or a Ryan TCAD. (Ed. Note: this interview took place before Avidyne's purchase of Ryan.)

Well, it turns out, if you're going to have a big airplane, you're going to have TCAS II. And that's ten times as expensive.

And so, as you go across, kind of, the same idea, in a lot of cases as you go upstream, the same idea becomes more sophisticated and really, quite a bit more expensive.

Aero-News: So with each sensor, an order of magnitude more...?

Dan: Some cases it might be twice as much, and in other cases it might be a hundred times as much.

Aero-News: And then... your problems integrating them just explode exponentially.

Dan: That's right.

And, add that on top of the fact that your software and hardware certification levels are raised significantly, and you've got a whole different level of challenge.

So, certainly one of the things that I've learned in the last few years of being here, and talking about how we do Eclipses.... you know, we are on the Skywest commuter fleet and we did a whole Part 25 cert there, and we got some experience with that, and we're working with a real Part 121 operator, a real airline operator guy.   And we've hired a bunch of people who've worked in that world.

You know, I've come to realize that, [although] us low-end guys may say, "Hey, you put this stuff in a 727, it'll be fine," it really wouldn't meet the market, and the certification, requirements of those airplanes.

I think that... one of the things that supports that [realization] is that Avidyne has really good relationships with Collins and also with Honeywell. I think that's because they've begun to realize, that, hey, we're innovators. We're doing some interesting things. There might be some benefit in working together with us.

On the other hand, we've realized that we're not going to try to sell our stuff to their market. That's because we know that that wouldn't really meet the requirements, and we'd end up getting ourselves into a dissatisfied-customer situation. They might be really satisfied that they paid a quarter as much, but then they'd be really dissatisfied that it really didn't meet their needs!

Aero-News: They might have to do it four times.

Dan: So, I think it's unlikely that any of the low-end guys are going to really significantly challenge the Collins and Honeywell and to a lesser extent, Thales, for high-end products, anytime soon.

Aero-News: So, what we do have is maybe... some sharing of ideas and convergence of technologies?

Dan: Right. And there may be some crossover where we can work together on things, you know. Avidyne is open to that kind of thing.

Federated Versus Integrated: The Future Of Your Cockpit

Aero-News: Is there anything else you see, in the future, going into the sensor suite, of a typical GA, even heavy-GA, aircraft?

Dan: Well, one of the things that's happening is that the "federated" cockpit is becoming the "integrated" cockpit. Where we were ten years ago was the federated cockpit. You had all these boxes and they kinda could talk to each other a little bit. And there are all these different companies making all these different products, and companies like Avidyne came along and said, "we'll hook up to this guy's radar and that guy's traffic system and this other guy's enhanced ground prox system" -- these boxes that kind of worked separately. Maybe they had separate displays, maybe we combined the displays or did something like that.

And the state of the art circa three years ago was a reasonably well-put-together, federated cockpit. I'm talking light GA, because it's been integrated up at the high end for a while. Now we're starting to talk about the integrated cockpit.

Aero-News: But at the high end, even there, nobody's been integrated the way you're integrated in Eclipse, have they?

Dan: Yeah, they have to some extent. If you've got a Gulfstream 550 with the Honeywell EASy (Ed. Note: Dan is slightly entangling two different Honeywell integrated systems here; EASy is Dassault's, and Gulfstream calls theirs PlaneView) you have a lot of the same kind of integration. All that systems stuff on big displays, you've got that kind of thing; you've got a common data bus that's not quite as integrated as we are but, yeah, you've got a lot of the same concepts.

Aero-News: I didn't mean to sidetrack you, but I wanted to pin my knowledge down.

Dan Schwinn (resuming): So what's happening, is we're in th dawn of the integrated era. And a Cirrus is a stare of the art integrated airplane, because Avidyne integrated the Garmins, and the S-Tec [autopilot], and the L-3 sensors onto our screen, we control some of those devices --that's state of the art today.

But it's not going to be state of the art in two or three years. State of the art then will be either, one company's designing all the stuff, or companies are working together to design a much higher level of integration. You'll get a lot of benefits from that.

I'll give you an example of a benefit. I'm pretty sure this is not confidential. Every jet engine that's ever been made has what they call a PT0 sensor or sometimes it's called a P2T2 Sensor. Basically it's pressure -- meaning altitude -- and temperature -- at the inlet to the engine. 'Cause you need to know that to figure out how much gas to put in.

On the Eclipse, there's a data bus, and the air data's running around to every system on the airplane. So the engines don't have to have that separate pressure and temperature sensor. Because it's more integrated than that.

And so what you're going to see is the benefits of integration, where multiple sensors doing the same thing are going to go away. Systems are going to work better because they have more data than they used to have.

Aero-News: So you only have that redundancy that's designed there for safety -- but not unnecessary redundancy where sensors are built into multiple locations.

Dan: Right. It adds weight and cost, reduces reliability, and then you're gonna also get -- for example, in our system we have winds aloft. Big deal. Well, to get winds aloft you need to know your groundspeed and track and your airspeed and heading. right? So, you always used to take out your E6B and put your heading in and put your airspeed in and then look at your GPS and get your groundspeed and track for your computer.

Well, we have all that data so we just show it to you. No big deal. That's the kind of thing that happens from integration. Things that used to be kind of a headache to do, or you wouldn't bother to do them, just become completely simple.

Another one we have, which is a great example of more integration, is, if you're flying an ILS, once upon a time you were taught -- and it went in one ear and out the other -- that if you have a couple of radios you should set 'em both for that ILS, and cross-check it as you're flying down. If one of those things is wrong, that could be a bad outcome.

You're not even required to have dual ILSes to fly IFR, although most airplanes do. And you're not required to cross-check 'em, but it's kind of a good idea. On the Meridian [with the Avidyne system] --

Aero-News: -- the crosscheck is automatic!

Dan: It's automatic. You tune both radios to the ILS. We detect that they're both tuned to the same thing. And we crosscheck 'em. And we put up an error if there's an [unsat] ILS crosscheck. We also are crosschecking air data, and we're crosschecking attitude, so a whole bunch of workload that the pilot used to have, is gone away.

Aero-News: That's almost like what they do in the high-end military systems, where you have multiple computers voting on the pilot's input.

Dan: We're not at the voting stage yet, but this is what I mean by saying there's going to be more and more and more high levels of integration.

So I think that we're at the dawn of the integrated era. And I think that you're going to see a lot of continued really rapid innovation around, and more, and higher levels of, integration.

Aero-News: Do you think that an integrated design process, like has happened with Eclipse, for example, could be the wave of the future?

Dan: It absolutely is.

Aero-News: Where the panel guys, and the airframe guys, and the engine guys, all work together from a clean sheet of paper?

Dan: It's going to be more that it was with Eclipse in the future. Eclipse is blazing the way, but again, it's the first time it's been done on the light side. It's just going to get more integrated as time goes on.

Eclipse is definitely -- when that airplane gets out, it's going to be so far ahead of anything else. But, you can see beyond it. And that's kind of what we're excited about.

Aero-News: So an OEM who's going to be doing something new ought to give you guys a call.

Dan: They tend to do that, actually.

To Be Continued...

FMI: www.avidyne.com