Integrated Flight Deck With Touchscreen Capabilities For Rotary Wing Platforms

Garmin has taken the wraps off the G5000H at Heli-Expo 2012. The integrated flight deck is specifically designed for twin turbine, medium lift helicopters. The G5000H combines widescreen displays with touchscreen controls for this class of helicopters.

“We are able to leverage our many years of experience providing quality and reliable situational awareness capabilities like synthetic vision, terrain alerting and datalink weather, to design a system that specifically supports the unique needs and challenges of the helicopter operating environment,” said Carl Wolf, Garmin’s vice president of aviation sales and marketing. “With HSVT and HTAWS plus innovative tools like touchscreen control, Telligence voice command and 3D audio, the G5000H promises to reduce workload and enhance the safety of each mission.”

The G5000H features high-resolution, wide aspect ratio primary flight displays (PFD) and multi-function displays (MFD). The system supports multiple display sizes and is scalable to support a large number of display and touchscreen controller configurations. The landscape oriented displays have multi-pane capability that allows multiple pages to be viewed side-by-side on any of the displays. Therefore, pilots can simultaneously view their primary flight display, maps, charts, checklists and system synoptics, HTAWS, TCAS, flight planning, weather or video input pages.

The touchscreen helicopter management system gives pilots rapid access to the flight information they want. It also has the ability to control a variety of operations within the cockpit such as flight management system functions, lighting, environmental controls, electrical power distribution and hydraulic systems. It has a menu-driven interface with intuitive icons, audio and visual feedback, and animation so pilots know exactly how the system is responding to their input, and the growth-oriented architecture allows for future technologies to be accommodated via software updates.

The G5000H also has numerous optional features:

• Helicopter Synthetic Vision Technology (HSVT) displays an “out-the-window” view of the surroundings, regardless of the weather conditions. HSVT seamlessly blends information about the helicopter’s position with topographic and helicopter-specific obstacle databases to create and display real-time 3D images. Land, water and sky are clearly differentiated with shading and textures that are similar to the topographical colors found on the MFD moving map. HSVT alerts pilots of potential ground hazards by displaying terrain and obstacles that pose a threat to the helicopter.
• HTAWS provides graphical and audible alerts of potential terrain and obstacle conflicts along the flight path. Garmin’s HTAWS includes forward looking terrain avoidance (FLTA) capability with visual and aural advisories to keep pilots informed of hazardous terrain and obstacles.
• Worldwide datalink weather solutions enable the display of graphical weather including NEXRAD, METARs, TAFs, TFRs, winds aloft, echo tops, precipitation type at the surface, lightning strikes, storm-cell data, AIRMETs, and SIGMETs.
• Traffic systems offer TAS or TCAS I capability and combine ADS-B enhanced active and passive surveillance data to pinpoint specific traffic threats.
• Global Connectivity Options include the ability to make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages and transmit critical data off the aircraft while on the ground or in flight.
• Advanced Audio Features including Telligence voice command, 3D spatial audio processing, advanced auto squelch, three COM support and backlighting and ambient noise based volume adjustment.

FMI: www.garmin.com