In late 1995, around the time of the highly publicized crash of an American Airlines Boeing 757 on approach to Cali, Colombia, Dassault launched a research and development program aimed at applying the most advanced avionics technologies then available to a radically different kind of cockpit. The French company’s objectives were to improve pilot situational awareness, reduce workload and offer a more intuitive man-machine interface, all predicated on the worthy goals of improving safety and keeping the pilots in the loop at all times. The culmination of that eight-year design effort is the recently certified Falcon 900EX with the EASy integrated avionics system.
The challenge for Dassault now lies in ensuring that the pilots EASy is intended to serve can unlearn many of their old habits and become proficient using an avionics system based on a personal-computing type of operating environment and point-and-click menus. That’s where FlightSafety comes in. Designing a radically different cockpit inevitably meant coming up with a new approach to training, and Dassault and FlightSafety have worked together to devise a curriculum that is careful not to hit pilots with a fire hose of information, while ensuring that they retain all they have learned during initial training.
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