Andrew Doyle/FAREHAM
GULFSTREAM HAS selected Meggitt Aerospace's secondary flight-display system as an option for its GIV and GV business jets, following the completion of flight trials earlier this year. The deal follows Cessna's recent decision to include the system in the Citation X business jet.
The Fareham, UK-based company claims to be the first in the world to have integrated attitude, altitude and airspeed instruments into a single secondary display unit, using solid-state sensors instead of conventional mechanical gyros.
"Nobody in the world has flown a solid-state standby attitude indicator contained in a single box," says Peter O'Sullivan, marketing director at Meggitt. Although the Boeing 777 has electronic secondary displays on the flight deck, the instruments are located separately in the aircraft's avionics bay.
"We have achieved something, which we and the industry at large thought was impossible: ie, the packaging of the avionics and display into a single 3 ATI-sized instrument," says O'Sullivan. "It was an intellectual challenge."
O'Sullivan says that the device's air-data unit - which feeds pressure readings from pilot tubes on the aircraft exterior to the airspeed/altitude databus - has not been integrated in the box, although it is technically possible.
He says that this is to avoid feeding the pressure pipes through to the back of the cockpit display panels so that "...leaks and lags in the pilot system can be minimised". The air-data module can be located as close to the external sensor as possible, with only electrical connections to the secondary flight-display unit.
Meggitt claims, that using solid-state technology boosts total reliability to 12,000h mean time between failures, compared with 2,000h for conventional devices, and that repair costs are reduced because the device can be handled more ruggedly than delicate electro-mechanical equipment.
The secondary display can also be linked to the aircraft's flight-data recorder, increasing the quality of data recorded. Meggitt believes that the unit will help many carriers achieve the accuracy of altitude data necessary for the reduced vertical-separation minimum (RVSM) requirements on transatlantic operations. "There is an opportunity to sell the device as part of an RVSM solution," says O'Sullivan.
The UK company says that it is "...talking to all major aircraft manufacturers - civil and military. We are also having dialogue with Boeing about including the secondary display on the new-generation Boeing 737."
Source: Flight International
