Evolution Flight Display

[hharney]

I attended the Aspen Avionics presentaion last night at the local airport (GRR). It was sponsored by Mayday Avionics, local shop that has a pretty good reputaion for working on a varity of aircraft. Many of you have seen this in recent magazines, Oshkosh or Sun-N-Fun. Larry and I spoke to the guys at Osh last year for quite a whille. It was going to be available by 2008...............well now it's 2009 before any of us plain folk will see an oppurtunity to fork out 10K for the Pro model. The presenter from Aspen has a F33 with the Pro model in front of him. He has 75 or so hours behind it. Sounds pretty cool.

It is very upgradeable. Let's say you decide the buy the pilot model for 6K and later on you finally bite the bullet and add a IFR certified GPS. All you have to do is have some software loaded into the unit and it's a Pro model. Cost would be the difference between the two units at 4K. All the upgrades have to be made good at the Avionics shop.

The back up battery is good for a minimum of 30 minutes but will normally always last longer. The FAA says 30 minimum and the whole battery has to be changed after 5 years no matter what condition. Probably a good thing. Very inexpensive for the battery but has to be installed by the shop again.

This little unit is really neat. It's just about everything wrapped up into a nice package. Install was originally thought to be 2K but that will never happen. They aren't real sure yet what he install would be in a Skymaster but they know it's going to be more than 2K. Some of the features like HSI, ADI, Airspeed tape, True, Indicated and Ground shows all the time. You can switch the lower HSI to ARC view which is really nice. You can set up your DH, and your minimum on an alert (visual and audio). Also has an altitude alert the same way for cruise. Has a built in VFR GPS for the brains, so it knows where it is and what the aircraft is doing. You have to have an IFR GPS to drive the Pro model. All Cert GPS will work except the Northstar. So it has it's own RSM antenna for the GPS and also an ACU to convert all the info fed to it from analog to digital. In the future they are already talking Synthetic Vision that again will just require the upgrade at the shop and possibly another ACU for converting more info.

It has a built in Flight Director, an Air Data Computer that reads winds, direction and speed at all times. You can user set your V speeds into the airspeed tape. It also has a GPS Steering built right in to the unit. The 400A, B and such will couple for the autopilot too. You have to keep the 256 King indicator to run the auto pilot system but don't think too many 337's have those. Keep the airspeed, altimiter and the AI and remove the T&B, VSI for more room.

If you have two GPS systems like 430's you can point on the HSI to two different beacons at the same time. Kinda neat. When shooting the approach with this unit, you have everything you need from the 1/3 upper of the HSI and the full ADI. Today we have to look spoke and hub with the Evolution it's just all right there on one dial.

Herb:

I've looked at these models as well, and it seems like a no brainer if and when someone is going to do an upgrade. I looked at just an HSI, and it alone was going to be $8-10K. So, may as well get all the other slick gadgets and redundancies for the same price. Now, if my budget would just catch up to my tastes and technologies!

Keven
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