#GLASS COCKPIT UPGRADE UPGRADE#
#GLASS COCKPIT UPGRADE PRO#

The big-three equipment manufacturers–Rockwell Collins, Honeywell and Universal Avionics–report that the vast majority of buyers of retrofit cockpit systems wait until it’s time for paint and interior or a C check before installing an upgraded LCD cockpit.

#GLASS COCKPIT UPGRADE UPGRADE#

That sentiment is shared by the scores of professional aviators who certainly wouldn’t mind flying with the latest hardware but who also realize the decision to upgrade the company airplane’s cockpit with the latest technology is connected with other factors. “But spending $500,000 or $750,000 for a glass cockpit just doesn’t make a lot of sense for us right now. “We’ve taken a look at some of the upgrade options that are available,” said a captain for an East Coast flight department that operates a 13-year-old Falcon 900B. Activity appears to be picking up as choices grow and prices start edging down, but there remains ample resistance to the idea of completely overhauling the instrument panel. Still, the trend toward flat-panel glass displays in aging airplanes hasn’t caught on the way avionics manufacturers and installers thought it would when the first flight-deck upgrades arrived five or so years ago.

Unless you’re flying a business jet manufactured less than seven years ago, chances are the newest technology at your disposal is round dials, CRT screens and maybe a handheld electronic flight bag (EFB) computer for storing digital approach charts. Cockpit file servers can hold dozens of binders worth of procedure charts within their hard drives, as well as interactive checklists and links to video from external cameras or an infrared enhanced-vision system. Active-matrix LCD flight displays bring added capabilities for presentation of color weather maps delivered via satellite datalink. Merely recreating the blue-over-brown ADI presentation that’s been around since the 1930s with the original Sperry artificial horizon is one thing transforming the flight deck into an information nerve center is quite another. Two or three months of downtime usually isn’t an option unless the airplane will also be going in for fresh paint and interior or a major maintenance inspection–and those extras only add yet more downtime.īut for the unique subset of business airplanes with hull values high enough to justify the expense and production dates far enough in the past that they’re likely to be equipped with older electromechanical or early CRT instruments, an upgrade to glass displays can draw back the curtain on a world of possibility.

Confusion–and even a certain amount of misinformation–about available retrofit options makes for difficult choices when it comes time to decide which, if any, cockpit upgrade makes the most sense for a given airplane.Īnd let’s face it, the time it takes to perform even a relatively straightforward installation can be a deal breaker for many others. Signing a check with so many zeros on it certainly stops some owners cold in their tracks. The thought of putting a functional business airplane through the upheaval of a major cockpit retrofit probably gives most chief pilots and flight-department managers heart palpitations.

#GLASS COCKPIT UPGRADE PRO#

Sitting alone on a simple workbench outside the airplane was the new instrument panel, milled from a piece of solid aluminum and ready to accept a modern suite of Rockwell Collins Pro Line 21 flight displays. Eerily devoid of the usual cascading wood veneer cabinets and stately leather seats, the cabin was now quite literally in hands of a small army of unseen craftsmen who were busily fabricating materials in Duncan’s wood and leather shops. The empty husk of the passenger compartment revealed more heavy wire bundles running along the walls and disappearing into the depths of the baggage area. Technicians crawled over the remains as preparations were made to bring on board a jigsaw puzzle of new furnishings and avionics.

From the nose to the tail, workers had finished gutting nearly all of the major equipment inside the airplane. Squeezed into a hangar at Duncan Aviation’s modification center in Lincoln, Neb., the lackluster 17-year-old Falcon 50 was undergoing a transformation that would shed years from its well worn façade, both inside the cockpit and throughout the rest of its now empty shell. The power levers and rudder pedals remained, but nearly everything else readily recognizable to a pilot–the control columns, seats, gauges, radios and annunciator lights–had been ripped from the cockpit to reveal the utter chaos behind the instrument panel.

Part of an overhead instrument panel hung from the ceiling, suspended by yet more wires. More wire slithered up from the floor in bundles as thick as rope. Thick coils of wire wound like serpents along the pale green walls. The scene was straight out of a science fiction movie.

Glass cockpit upgrade