On the opening day of Heli-Expo 2017 (Dallas, 6th-9th March), Thales has unveiled the latest connectivity-enabled functionalities on its Avionics 2020 future cockpit, billed as the first fully connected avionics suite for helicopters.
Christian Bardot, Thales Vice President, Helicopter Avionics, even suggests that the helicopter market may be seeing the beginning of the end of traditional cockpit architecture. The Thales cockpit, he explains, can turn any platform into a customized aircraft for a particular mission that can be reconfigured during flight when the mission changes.
The new functionalities on the Avionics 2020 for helicopters are designed to display open world information alongside information coming from the secured avionics, in an integrated manner. According to Thales, this makes Avionics 2020 the world’s first fully connected cockpit for helicopters.
Unveiled at the 2013 Paris Air Show, Avionics 2020 has evolved into Thales’s next generation helicopter avionics suite, founded on the principles of natural and direct hands-on interaction using full touchscreen functionalities and interfaces structured to be task oriented and ease flight crew operations.
The cockpit is designed around Thales’s belief that current cockpit architecture is fast reaching the limit of the complexity that can be equipped on-board. Avionics 2020 results from partnerships with researchers, scientific institutions and experts, to refine understanding in human-machine interface (HMI), ergonomics and neural decision-making, and apply it to the aerospace industry.