18 February 2016
+VIDEO French manufacturer Daher has announced a raft of cockpit upgrades to its TBM 900 single-engine turboprop aircraft. The 2016 aircraft was given its public debut at this week’s Singapore Airshow and coincided with a new software release by Garmin for the G1000 flightdeck fitted to the TBM 900.
The upgrades:
Flight envelope monitoring through the Electronic Stability and Protection (ESP) and the Under-speed Protection (USP) systems, both of which have been added to the autopilot. These electronic monitoring and stability augmentation systems assist the pilot in maintaining the aircraft in a stable flight condition when flight parameters are exceeded.
New aural alerts for stall, overspeed, landing gear extension and oxygen mask use. These alerts replace aural sounds for better warning identification.
Angle of Attack (AoA) sensor with visualisation on the cockpit’s Primary Flight Display electronic instruments.
Two-way wireless link-up to the aircraft’s Garmin G1000 all-glass cockpit avionics suite from a mobile device that runs the Garmin Pilot application. This Bluetooth linkup is via Garmin’s Flight Stream 210 wireless gateway, and enables the syncing of prepared flight plans and streaming of GPS, weather, traffic and other information to/from the avionics system.
L-3 Lightweight Data Recorder from L-3 Aviation for voice and flight data recording. This system has become an industry reference for general aviation and executive aircraft, as well as helicopters.
An option is the Garmin GRA 55 all-digital radar altimeter, which provides highly accurate altitude-above-ground and rate-of-change readouts.
“With the Model Year 2016 TBM 900, we are offering our customers a concentration of innovation, technology and safety improvements that can be compared to bringing an ‘e-copilot’ into the cockpit to reduce the pilot’s workload,” explained Nicolas Chabbert, the Senior Vice President of Daher’s Airplane Business Unit.
Daher has also just launched a TBM Channel on YouTube here
