Plans A "Pilot" Program With Selected Users Before Certification

Avidyne this week offered what it called a "comprehensive" update on the certification and delivery of Release 9.2 and the DFC100 autopilot on a company message board. Avidyne says the fundamental differences between DFC100 and DFC90 involved a few architectural changes and several extra functional features, including VNAV mode, Vectors integration, other envelope protection enhancements not included in the DFC90. The company says that there are "a bunch of new goodies in there that we haven't told anyone about yet."

"Those changes are all schedule deltas on top of DFC90 but the good news is that we are done with development, have already entered final "tests-for-credit" and expect to be submitting everything to the FAA within the next 30 days or so," Avidyne said. Once that is complete, there will be what is typically a 20-40 day wait period as the FAA crunches through the reams of data and documents submitted and fly it themselves for final evaluation. The end of that wait period results in FAA certification, but the process is also the final risk point since the FAA could require a change.

Avidyne says it plans to run a short "pilot program" after certification where they will select a few airplanes which will be upgraded at different shops, validated, and then documents will be updated/changed as required to ensure the upgrade process for all that follow is as smooth as possible.

Certification of the DFC90 required extensive FAA testing to get the Envelope Protection features approved. Avidyne says all of that is considered known ground now with both the company and the FAA, so the same kinds of fielding delays we had in DFC90 are not anticipated. When the pilot program is complete, which Avidyne estimates to be about three weeks, it will be released for mass installation in R9 equipped airplanes.

DFC100

The company says it has the physical assets for the entire DFC100 customer base already in the process of build out and the supporting R9 software update will be a field loadable software update so there are no plans to have to ship anything back to an Avidyne facility. 

Meanwhile, Avidyne says release 9.2 has fixes for the following items; the missing range-to-altitude arc, the Direct-to guidance issue and the map redraw slowdown.  There are also other bug fixes that will be provided in the release notes.

Finally, the company reports that SynVis is proceeding in parallel with the DFC100 program and is also making good progress. SynVis is part of Release 9.3.  Avidyne engineers have flown versions of it and say it is continually being improved by the software development team.

The company plans a meeting with the FAA this fall to present a nearly final version so that there will be "no surprises" during the later FAA flight testing.  As the development progresses and the DFC100 is certified, Avidyne says they will have greater fidelity on a certification date.

FMI: www.avidyne.com