Virtual Event: Connecting the Flight Deck to the Cloud

This fireside chat recap is from FLYING’s “What’s Next in General Aviation” Virtual Event on Wednesday.

FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: Honeywell Aerospace launched in early October its newest flight deck, Anthem, which it proposes will not only remain connected throughout all phases of flight, but give the pilot the ability to integrate multiple apps and sources of information along the way.

DETAILS: FLYING’s Editor-in-Chief Julie Boatman talks with Vipul Gupta about the launch of Honeywell Aerospace’s new integrated and connected flight deck, the Anthem avionics suite.

SPEAKER: Gupta is vice president and general manager of Honeywell Aerospace’s avionics business enterprise.

BIO: Gupta has dedicated his career to aerospace, joining Honeywell in 2001. He’s responsible for leading the company’s $2 billion Avionics Gold Business Enterprise, including integrated avionics systems, military avionics, displays, flight management systems, flight controls, surveillance, weather radar, navigation, radios, communication radios, datalink, and the BendixKing product lines for general aviation. Gupta is an instrument-rated private pilot based in Chandler, Arizona.

KEY QUOTES FROM GUPTA:

“For all of the pilots, and everyone I’ve spoken to, the number one thing is ‘aviate.’ So, the simple philosophy and the simple priority order is ‘aviate, navigate, communicate,’ and then all of the other secondary pieces of information which comes through. As we are looking at our flight deck solution, we actually focus on that particular philosophy. We never take attention away from the ‘aviate’ part of the responsibility that the pilot has.”

“What we have done [with Anthem] is we have provided all of the experience of that application that can come with the tablet, straight onto the avionics, straight onto the front displays, onto the fingertips of the pilot.”

“Scalability is key for Honeywell Anthem to be able to serve so many markets. If you look at our current set of offerings for the integrated flight deck, the Primus Epic, it is serving a very narrow swath of [the] market, which is high-end general aviation and a business aviation segment. When we started thinking about what we want to do as part of the new integrated flight deck, one of the thought processes was, ‘What was the market which you were going to serve?’ And it started some time ago, UAM [urban air mobility] wasn’t there at that time, right? But the focus was definitely on the low-end GA, and the air transport and the UAM and air transport came through as well.”