Pro Line Fusion Touchscreens Aim for Challenger 604 Cockpit

Rockwell Collins is partnering with Bombardier and Nextant Aerospace to upgrade Challenger 604s with a Pro Line Fusion touchscreen flight deck. The Challenger 604 will be the first Part 25 jet with touchscreen displays in the instrument panel. Garmin G5000-equipped jets and Gulfstream’s new Honeywell-equipped G500/G600 have touchscreen controllers, although the G500/G600 also has touchscreen panels replacing switches on the cockpit overhead. 

The Challenger 604 upgrade will be the second Rockwell Collins Pro Line Fusion touchscreen upgrade in a jet and the third retrofit program; the first was the King Air series, and that was followed by the supplemental type certificate (STC) for the Part 23 Citation CJ3, which was approved in April (in partnership with Duncan Aviation and Textron Aviation).

While Rockwell Collins is engineering the STC for the Challenger 604, Bombardier and Nextant Aerospace will provide installations of the Pro Line Fusion upgrade at their facilities. The Nextant version of the upgrade will be designated the 604XT. Nextant will also be the installation design certification lead and perform the first installation for the STC program at its Cuyahoga County Airport facility in Cleveland, Ohio, according to Craig Olson, Rockwell Collins vice president and general manager of business and regional systems. At customer advisory board meetings, Challenger 604 operators were asking about upgrade opportunities, he added. 

All new King Airs are now factory-installed with the Pro Line Fusion touchscreen displays, and the suite is available as a retrofit. In the 604, the fully integrated Pro Line Fusion flight deck will replace the jet’s original Pro Line 4 CRT-based avionics with three 14.1-inch landscape-oriented LCDs that increase the display area by 35 percent. “This is going to modernize the flight experience,” Olson said, “with advanced graphics, configurable windows and the touchscreen interface.”

The Pro Line Fusion flight deck is now flying on 18 forward-fit and five aftermarket aircraft models. The AW609 tiltrotor, King Airs, CJ3 and Challenger 604 also have the touchscreen interface. Rockwell Collins expects the Challenger 604 Pro Line Fusion STC will earn certification by the fall next year. 

During the initial design of the touchscreen interface, there were pros and cons about the use of this technology for avionics, Olson said. “When we came out with this concept, we had a lot of naysayers, and there were raging debates around the acceptability of touch.” Rockwell Collins didn’t want to replicate what other avionics manufacturers were doing, which was replacing switches and knobs with touchscreen controllers. However, the Pro Line Fusion interface is designed with a "flattened" architecture, he said, “in terms of the ability to quickly get to the information you need.” Pilots can use either touch on the three large panel displays or more traditional interfaces such as the cursor control devices and qwerty keyboard and radio tuning devices to plan a flight, set frequencies and so on. The large touchscreens have a bezel with anchor points to help pilots get a firm grip in turbulence. “Pilots have been successful even in turbulent conditions using touch,” Olson said. “We’re pleased with that, and it has enabled us to walk upmarket [into larger aircraft] in terms of comfort around touchscreens. The feedback continues to be extremely positive in terms of an intuitive human-machine interface.”

The baseline 604 retrofit will provide ADS-B out; satellite-based augmentation system GNSS; LPV approaches; radius-to-fix legs; synthetic vision with Rockwell Collins airport dome and extended runway centerlines; onboard weather radar overlays showing obstacles, special-use airspace and search patterns; geo-referenced charts; and database updates either via a USB port on the front of the displays or optional Rockwell Collins Aircraft Information Manager wireless data loading. Fans and Link 2000 will be optional. The standby display is a Mid-Continent Instruments and Avionics standby attitude module.

“We’re trying not to approach this as just solving the ADS-B mandate, but [rather] modernizing the cockpit and increasing the residual value of the aircraft,” Olson said. “This solution gets you the next-generation architecture as opposed to a bolt-on approach.”

Jean-Christophe Gallagher, Bombardier Business Aircraft vice president and general manager, customer experience said, "We are growing our aftermarket service offerings, and this is one more example of how we are focusing on adding value to our customers' aircraft."

Rockwell Collins isn't setting the price for the upgrade. “Since it will be available through Nextant and Bombardier, we will defer to them in terms of pricing,” he said. “We’re going to own the STC. Then it’s up to the installers to determine the price for the installation of the STC.” Installers will also offer other upgrades at the same time as the avionics, such as the Rockwell Collins Venue cabin management system, which is STC'd on the Challenger 604. “There are plenty of opportunities for folks to bring new capabilities to these aircraft and extend their life,” Olson said. Nextant has set a baseline introductory price for its 604XT upgrade of the Challenger 604 at $599,950.