Since unveiling the Anthem avionics suite in October 2021, the Honeywell team has written more than six million lines of code, logged more than 10,000 hours of bench running time, and completed hundreds of flight hours in a Pilatus PC-12. Honeywell isn’t publicizing a date for when Anthem will enter service, but it is targeting a variety of market segments, from advanced air mobility (AAM) aircraft to Part 23 and 25 airplanes, both in the retrofit and forward-fit (new aircraft) arenas.
Three companies have thus far announced plans for Anthem avionics in their aircraft: Boom Supersonic for its supersonic airliner, which will also be available as a business jet, and AAM developers Lilium and Vertical Aerospace.
Aiming to meet the needs of small to large aircraft, from light airplanes to airliners and even military aircraft, Honeywell plans for Anthem to be a familiar environment for new pilots as they progress into more complex aircraft. While the full Anthem suite is installed in just the PC-12, Honeywell has also tested some Anthem hardware in its flight test Leonardo AW139 helicopter.
A typical Anthem flight deck will have three touch-display units (TDUs) replacing the traditional dual primary flight display and single multifunction display. Pilot interface display units (PIDUs) can be mounted in a center console or elsewhere. Each TDU can host a page that looks exactly like the PIDU, called a pilot interface window (PIW), so all the functions that control Anthem are available on any display.
Aircraft manufacturers will have flexibility to choose cockpit layouts and the number and size of Anthem displays and controls needed for various sizes of aircraft, thanks to Anthem's modular architecture. The small size of Anthem's computers also will make it easier to design where the hardware resides, instead of having to make a large avionics cabinet to house circuit boards and other products.
Some planned Anthem features include a secure cockpit browser, which will enable certain software apps to run in a secure window, such as the web version of ForeFlight. A connected mission manager will provide a timeline view of an entire flight.
The PIW is the primary interface that pilots will use to manage Anthem, and its touchscreen has all the buttons for operating radios, planning a flight, and pulling up systems synoptics. At the bottom of the PIW is probably the most unique feature of Anthem: the multiple data field or smart scratchpad.
Honeywell's user-experience design team took the FMS scratchpad further into the future and made it much more useful. Touching the scratchpad enables the user to input various types of data, and the scratchpad automatically recognizes the data type and prepares it for proper placement.
For example, when starting to type in a frequency, the smart scratchpad recognizes what it is and automatically suggests the full input for the user to accept or change. It knows the difference between a frequency and a transponder code or an altitude and where to put these numbers.