Pilatus PC-12 With Anthem Flight Deck Debuts At Oshkosh

OSHKOSH—Honeywell is exhibiting a Pilatus PC-12 turboprop fitted with its fifth-generation Anthem flight deck during EAA AirVenture Oshkosh.

The company-owned PC-12 on display completed its first flight with the full Anthem suite on May 12, flying in Arizona from Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport to Phoenix Deer Valley Airport. Honeywell officials say the aircraft has logged more than 120 flight hours since Anthem was installed, initially on the right side of the cockpit. The current PC-12NG comes with Honeywell’s Primus Apex integrated flight deck.

“One of the first things we worked on developing on that plane is making sure we have a stable working PFD (primary flight display), that the flight instruments are all functioning properly,” says Ed Manning, a Honeywell Anthem program pilot. “We didn’t have the full systems integration of the aircraft done yet. Radios obviously were required to get in and out of Sky Harbor and a transponder. We tested all those on the ground to make sure they work but that was the first flight exercise.”

Unveiled by Honeywell in October 2021, Anthem is a platform founded on connectivity and autonomy as core tenets; the aim of its cockpit interface is to make an aircraft simple and intuitive to operate by the pilot. Advanced air mobility (AAM) vehicle manufacturers Lilium, Supernal and Vertical Aerospace have selected Anthem for their developmental aircraft and Honeywell says additional AAM and general aviation platforms will be revealed in the coming months.

Anthem displays are reconfigurable and interchangeable. The Honeywell PC-12 is laid out with three 13-in.-diagonal touch display units (TDU) in the pilots’ forward view and two smaller pilot interface display units set at an angle below the central TDU. A core feature of the user interface, Manning says, is a Pilot Interface Window that displays apps similar to the way apps are shown on a mobile phone screen.

Honeywell plans to add additional functionality to Anthem through successive software builds.

“We’ve seen big leaps in the maturity of the system in terms of the stability,” Manning says. “When it was just the one display on the right side it wasn’t enough to operate the aircraft fully. We’ve seen it really come from zero to be able to safely fly the aircraft in a pretty short period of time. We’ve worked out a lot of the stability issues and we’re going to move on shortly to adding more functionality.”