BAE Systems (stand 190) has put its Q-HUD head-up display system on show at EBACE for the first time after signing agreements with several airframers to study installation of the technology on business jets.
"This is the first time we are showing commercial avionics at EBACE," says Ric Morrow, BAE's director of business development at its New York-headquartered commercial avionics arm. "Now we are certainly going after a more global footprint.It's a whole different approach and what you'll see at EBACE is us emerging from what you saw at NBAA, which was our first foray into this environment."
Morrow claims to be receiving "significant interest" from OEMs and aims to bring the Q-HUD to market by late-2010.
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"The customer list we're going after is pretty inclusive of all the OEMs that are out there because the product itself is so much more flexible than HUDs have been in the past," he says.
Based on a breakthrough in optical technology, BAE has developed the Q-HUD as a low-cost, high-performance HUD that it claims is significantly smaller, lighter, and less expensive than existing systems.
Like a conventional HUD, the Q-HUD displays information such as airspeed, altitude, heading, pitch attitude, flight director and flightpath marker in the pilot's forward field of view. However, BAE's patented technology manipulates light using holographic waveguides, effectively generating the symbology within the glass, rather than projecting an image onto its surface. This means that the Q-HUD does not require a cumbersome projection system above the pilot's head-a major advantage in smaller business jet flightdecks.
Paul Childs, business development manager at BAE defence avionics, which pioneered the technology for the military market, says: "We actually inject the image into the side of the combiner, which enables us to significantly decrease the footprint of the overhead element, which in our case now is very minimal optics and a few electronics.
"It enables us to get into cockpits which have been inaccessible with current technology, both from a price and volume perspective. With our injection policy we can actually repackage to a form factor that enables us to get into those smaller cockpits."
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Morrow claims that BAE has over the last eight months signed "about 12" non-disclosure agreements" and has "six or seven sets of Catia data" to study installations of the Q-HUD.
In terms of securing a launch application, "we are pretty comfortable that we are in the mix for at least one, maybe two awards, by year-end hopefully",says Morrow.
Source: Flight Daily News