Sandel Announces New Glass Panel

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Sandel Avionics, a niche player best known for its TAWS units and other specialized cockpit instrumentation, plans to take on the likes of Garmin, Collins and Honeywell with what it describes as the most advanced and sophisticated glass cockpit yet. At the NBAA convention in Las Vegas Monday, Sandel’s Gerry Block unveiled the new Avilon system, which he said will be primarily aimed at the King Air retrofit market. For as surprising as the announcement itself was, the price is even more of an eye-opener: Sandel promises a $175,000 fly-away price for retrofits, a sticker that’s half the price (or less) of competing systems.

Block said to hit those numbers, the Avilon will be a modular system manufactured entirely by Sandel, including the panel itself with pre-mounted displays and line replaceable units, and shipped to dealers complete. He said the labor ratio for shops installing the equipment should be 80 percent removal and 20 percent installation for a total of about 100 hours and a week’s downtime. In announcing the new system on Monday, Sandel also said it has signed on four dealers in North America; three in the U.S. and one in Canada.

“In designing this system,” Block said, “we decided there were better ways to do things. But we wanted to manufacture an economical system that has profit for dealers and is a good value for customers.” The Avilon is a complete multi-display system that includes navigation, communication, ADAHRS, transponder and an ADS-B solution. It will also include an envelope-protected autopilot that will use the aircraft’s existing autopilot servos. Block said part of the design ethos for Avilon was safety, both in reliability and ease of operation for pilots. He said the aviation accident history is peppered with incidents of pilots being confused by onboard automation, either due to its complexity or because the systems perform in unexpected ways. The Avilon operating logic, he said, is simpler and more direct and features a predictive path system that anticipates future NextGen capabilities. Hardware-wise, the system is driven by triple redundant data networks that provide all the flight data to each component through multiple channels.

Sandel is planning an ambitious certification program that promises deliveries by mid-2016. It was expecting STC approval for the King Air 200 shortly and will add other models after that. Block said thus far, there has been no OEM interest, probably because no OEMs know about the system. “We’re a retrofit company. We don’t have any OEM for this,” Block said.

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