While large aircraft and engine development advances at a relatively slow pace, avionics technology progresses much faster and can quickly drive advances in safety and operational performance. Many of the world's leading aircraft electronics suppliers are demonstrating the fruits of extensive R&D investments at this week's Singapore Airshow, with a strong emphasis on reducing pilot workload in the flight deck and allowing airlines to decarbonize by flying more efficiently.
Adam Evanschwartz, who leads the avionics business unit product strategy at Collins Aerospace, outlined a half dozen “technology frontiers” on which the company is working, calling them building blocks for future aircraft and flight deck solutions. "The first building block—'perception sensing'—involves sensors that in the future will help the pilot and the aircraft make sense of what’s going on in the outside world," he explained to AIN. "That could include image recognition so the aircraft can detect and avoid non-cooperative traffic. Vision-based landing systems will supplement the information that pilots get from enhanced flight vision systems and head-up displays, including millimeter-wave sensors, and use all that information to ease the pilot’s workload, for example, by automatically warning that something is blocking the runway."
In this article
More In Avionics
