AgustaWestland’s new common cockpit concept is being adopted on all of its new helicopters in order to provide an identical “look and feel” to the operators. But the idea is about more than branding. Ultimately, it’s all to do with safety in the hope that in an emergency situation pilots will not have to give a moment’s thought to which model they are flying since all the commands are identical.
The Italy-based rotorcraft group is looking at a common avionics architecture design that might be adopted both for commercial and military helicopters to keep the product range competitive. The key elements of this are as follows: the cockpit display system, the automatic flight control system and the aircraft management and mission system. The mission system provides dual redundancy for the flight management system, vehicle monitoring system, communications and navigation control system, central maintenance system, digital map and health-and-usage monitoring system.
