Completion & Refurbishment: Airshow 4000 v2 Gets Major Upgrade

Rockwell Collins’s Airshow 4000 v2 moving map has gotten a major facelift, and the company brought in some of California’s top video game programmers to make sure designers got the new version right. The new v2 is a software upgrade, and the entirely new mapping includes some two hundred 3-D enhancements and makes use of satellite-derived topographic data from NASA. Thanks to the expertise of the video game team, the view, according to Rockwell Collins, is “dramatically realistic.”

The aircraft icon is an exact copy of the user’s own airplane, including the exterior paint scheme. Lighting, shadows and reflections are all realistically shown as the user selects from among such possibilities as zoom and viewing angles. The user can even select cockpit imagery such as the instrument panel and the pilot’s head-up display.
Rockwell Collins director of production marketing for cabin systems Andrew Mohr emphasizes that the system upgrade is purely software. In service next year, it will be the new baseline for existing hardware and new systems shipments. The software will also be available as an upgrade to existing hardware, with pricing to be determined.