After a five-year hiatus from NBAA, Thales is making a comeback to the business aviation show with its Avionics 2020 cockpit. It also plans to market a new system for generating and converting electrical power to start ­engines.

Unlike Thales’ previous flight deck products tailored to business aviation, Avionics 2020 version includes touchscreen capabilities and displays that take a nod from consumer tablets. The supplier is hoping to make a splash in the mid-size to ultra-large segments with the futuristic flight deck, which was first displayed at the Paris Air Show in June.

Thales says its new open architecture of the system will be a differentiator when the system comes into the market to compete with platforms from Rockwell Collins, Garmin and Honeywell. The new system will be built to allow OEMs to add third-party applications and make changes and modifications of their own to the avionics functions.

“Our customers do not want to be locked in with one supplier on an avionics suite. They want to be able to implement third-party functions, they want to be able to implement their own functions on board the flight deck, because the flight deck is a differentiator for them,” says Richard Perrot, head of marketing for Thales’ avionics division. “So we are proposing an open platform.”

The Avionics 2020 was conceived with new programs such as NextGen and SESAR in mind, and will be able to implement tools to reduce emissions and optimize aircraft spacing that will be presented to pilots through these programs.

The new cockpit vision features ­several functions that will be useful to business aviation operators, including the ability to quickly re-direct flight paths and show what-if scenarios about flying to alternate destinations. The touchscreen functions of the displays can be turned on or off throughout the cabin, and the displays can be spread out to multiple windows for an extra-large view.

Thales is in the preliminary stages of talking to four different manufacturers about using the system.

“We will go into a contractual phase most [likely] within one year from now to have a full five years of development and to target the programme entering into service in the frame of 2020,” says Perrot.

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Source: Flight Daily News