Leaning on the institutional knowledge that comes with installing more than 30,000 flight decks across various aircraft types over the past 20 years, Garmin’s latest avionics suite – the G3000 Prime – is the Kansas firm’s most advanced yet.
The first aircraft set to integrate the third-generation, all-touch-screen avionics system is Textron Aviation’s recently announced Cessna Citation CJ4 Gen3. The first of those light business jets is expected to be delivered to launch customer Ryan Samples in 2026.
Dan Lind, Garmin’s senior director of aviation sales and marketing, explained to reporters during a pre-NBAA BACE briefing at Garmin’s Kansas City headquarters how the company’s storied relationship with Textron Aviation facilitated development of the G3000 Prime suite – which he says draws on the best elements of its G1000 and G3000 avionics systems.
“There’s a lot of folks here that have worked with Textron Aviation for a long time to be where we’re at today,” Lind says. “We’re very, very proud to partner with Textron Aviation and present our next-generation flight deck, G3000 Prime.”
All of Garmin’s aviation products are manufactured in Olathe, Kansas and Salem, Oregon.
“Garmin is built on vertical integration,” Lind says. “It’s very, very important to us – we can control our own destiny, whether is a product or controlling development costs.”
The wide-reaching electronics company’s aerospace journey started more than 20 years ago with the G1000 avionics system, introduced on the Cessna Citation Mustang in 2003 with subsequent integration on the Beechcraft Bonanza, SkyCourier, and Grand Caravan platforms, Lind says.
Garmin announced the G3000 avionics suite in 2009 and brought it to market about three years later on the M2 and CJ3 platforms. It latest cockpit technology builds on the venerable systems that came before.
“One of the things we really want to focus on is just continuing to make it pilot-friendly, adding useful automations and making it easy to use,” Lind says. “We really focus on everything we do well within the G1000, G3000 and even some of our other products; take the best and bring it in.”
The G3000 Prime is oriented toward the Part 23 turbine, defence and advanced air mobility markets. Lind told FlightGlobal that Garmin, which has existing relationships with several electric air taxi companies, expects some to upgrade to G3000 Prime in the coming months.
’ALL NEW, ALL FAMILIAR’
G3000 Prime is designed to reduce pilot workload and streamline cockpit procedures with an intuitive, state-of-the-art interface that both pilot and co-pilot can interact with simultaneously. Maps, charts, weather and traffic applications can be accessed with one touch, while features such as taxiway routing and an “emergency return” function also ease the burden on flight deck crews.
The system features Garmin’s Autoland system, which will come as a standard feature in Textron Aviation’s new series of Gen3 light business jets.
“For example, the more information we can tell our system, the more it will help out the pilot,” he continues. “So, we can [tell the aircraft] how much runway we need in order to take off; it’s going to tell us whether I can take off on this specific runway based on the performance of my aircraft. And we can do the same thing from a landing perspective, as well.”
Lind says that while Garmin will continue adding more capabilities to G3000 Prime, it is a “mature product” that has been TSO (technical standard order) certificated.
“Hardware and software [are] complete,” he says.
The suite features 14-inch primary touch-screen displays with edge-to-edge, fingerprint-resistant glass, as well as a pair of smaller 7-inch secondary display units (SDUs).
The SDUs can, in some configurations, serve as an “integrated standby flight instrument display, removing the need for a dedicated standby flight instrument in the panel”, Garmin says.
“From a performance standpoint, you’ve got about twice the CPU power, four times the memory, and higher refresh rates,” Lind says. “It’s much, much smoother, and it just reacts very well as you go to, say, pinch-to-zoom or pan across a map.”
Garmin’s “multi-touch technology” allows users to brace their hands against the display; the system will recognise “desired inputs with the other fingertips”, Lind says.
The secondary displays are not equipped with buttons or knobs, which are located instead on a Garmin control unit to interact with common functions.
“The best way to describe this is highly flexible and responsive, [and] it’s really fast,” he says. “While it’s all new, it’s all familiar – it still feels like Garmin. Anyone who interacts with the system would be able to catch on very easily.”
