Friday, April 17, 2009

BAE Offers Heads-Up Display For Smaller Aircraft At LAAD

BAE Offers Heads-Up Display For Smaller Aircraft At LAAD
(NSI News Source Info) RIO DE JANIERO - April 17, 2009: BAE Systems chose to highlight its Quantum Heads-Up Display system at the Latin America Aerospace and Defense (LAAD) conference with the hope of garnering interest from Brazilian aerospace giant Embraer. "The specific objective for having Quantum HUD here at LAAD is Embraer," said John Nix of BAE. "Embraer obviously does both civil and military applications, and Quantum HUD is a unique system in that it's scalable across the breadth of their product lines, from the very smallest aircraft to the very largest aircraft." The heads up display is meant to replace the projection system in cockpits that displays flight information on a clear screen in the pilot's line of sight. The projection system is installed over a pilot's head in the cockpit. The projector systems are not used in small aircraft, so pilots have to look down at instrumentation to get data like speed, altitude and horizon information. BAE representatives at LAAD said their system could be mounted in small aircraft because it's about half the size of the conventional projector system. Instead of projecting an image from an overhead projector onto a display in front of the pilot, the BAE system eliminates the projector and "shoots" the image into the edge of the glass that is the display in front of the pilot, Nix said. There is "a tremendous amount of interest" in the system for small commercial aircraft, said Richard Morrow of BAE. "We don't have any contracts yet, but we anticipate probably four [requests for proposals] before the end of the year on this." Boeing also is interested in the system for the C-17 military transport, Nix added. Morrow said the response from Embraer at the show had been "very positive," and BAE planned to send representatives to the Brazilian company next week for further meetings.

No comments: