Contributor

Harry Weisberger

Innovative Solutions &amp; Support (IS&amp;S), an Exton, Pa. company that has been active in designing and providing RVSM upgrade kits for business aircraft and, more recently, electronic flight displays for a variety of military and cargo aircraft, announced its first formal electronic flight display retrofit project for business airplanes.

Teamed with Columbia Avionics of Columbia, Mo., IS&amp;S will provide its 8- by 6-inch (10-inch diagonal) flat-panel integrated displays for a program to retrofit Cessna Citation 500s and 650s, the company announced at the NBAA Convention last month. Columbia will soon begin a three-display installation in a Citation 501, an airplane for which the avionics mod center previously installed an IS&amp;S RVSM compliance package. Columbia expects the STC for the flat-panel cockpit in that aircraft by April. IS&amp;S quotes a price ranging from $110,000 to $150,000, not including installation.

The Columbia/IS&amp;S team announced it expects a sizeable market for the big-screen offering among operators of 1970s-vintage Citations with Bendix (S/N 275 and earlier) and Sperry electromechanical instrumentation, as well as those with first-generation cathode-ray-tube EFIS displays such as the Sperry/Honeywell EDZ-605 and Bendix EFIS-10.

The large-format primary flight displays will combine attitude, heading, airspeed, altimeters, vertical speed, AOA, radar altimeter and navigation information. The MFD will display airborne weather radar information, engine instrumentation, GPS/FMS navigation data, weather datalink, Jeppesen Jeppview approach charts, TCAS, EGPWS and other flight-related information, according to IS&amp;S.

The low-profile flat-panel primary flight and multifunction display units designed and built by IS&amp;S for the Citation panels drew a steady stream of admirers at the company’s NBAA 2005 booth last month. IS&amp;S and ABX Air, a Delaware cargo airline, previously won STC approval to install the same displays in Boeing 767s as replacements for the original 1980s-vintage Collins CRT-based EFIS screens.

New developments and products in avionics, specifically about aircraft electronics in the cockpit.