Classic turboprops go glass
Raytheon's Beechcraft King Airs may be "sixties" airplanes, but a recent cockpit overhaul of the models B200 and 350 puts their instrument panels firmly in the here and now. Gone are a whole flock of round gauges and the Rockwell-Collins Pro Line II avionics suite that have defined King Air panels for the past 20 years. In its place is Collins' Pro Line 21 avionics system.
In this application, the Pro Line 21 consists of three 8-by-10-inch active-matrix liquid-crystal displays. The three-tube setup, consisting of pilot and copilot primary flight displays (PFDs) plus a multifunction display (MFD) is standard equipment on all new B200s and 350s. The C90B, the smallest of the King Airs, will continue with Pro Line II avionics.
The new displays bring a wide range of new capabilities, reduce pilot workload, and improve situational awareness. For example, vertical tapes present airspeed and altitude information, and include cues for target airspeeds and altitudes, along with pink trend lines that predict the airplane's airspeed and altitude in the next 10 seconds. Across the bottom of the PFD the com 1 frequency, transponder code, Zulu time, air temperature, and com 2 frequency are displayed. The nav displays, occupying the bottom half of the PFD, can overlay radar imagery, flight plan route, nearest airports and navaids, and traffic and terrain symbology.
Engine information is at the top of the centrally mounted MFD, and should any parameter be approached or exceeded (interturbine temperature, for example) its associated gauge turns yellow or red to annunciate the condition. A second EHSI (electronic horizontal situation indicator) dominates the MFD, and it can be configured to show information from the ship's Honeywell Mark VIII enhanced ground proximity warning system, which incorporates a Class A TAWS (terrain awareness warning system). This provides digitized voice commands ("pull up, pull up," among others) to warn of dangerous terrain closures. An electronic checklist menu is also provided on the MFD. You call up and "check off" checklist items via yoke-mounted push buttons.
The system also displays Doppler weather radar imagery via Collins' TWR-850 turbulence-detection weather radar, and traffic information from the Pro Line's L3 Communications Skywatch HP TCAS 1 installation.
A panel-mounted radio-tuning unit is also in the new avionics package, although you can still tune com frequencies via the center pedestal-mounted Collins FMS-3000 flight management system. A dual attitude heading reference system provides the Pro Line's attitude, acceleration, and heading data, and a maintenance and diagnostics computer is also standard.
Rounding out the basic package are glareshield-mounted flight guidance and autopilot controls. Before the Pro Line 21, King Airs had their autopilot and flight director controls on the center pedestal.
Those big displays and glareshield controls give the new B200 and 350 cockpits the look and feel of a jet. And no wonder: The Pro Line 21 is the same avionics suite used in Raytheon's Premier 1 and Hawker 800XP business jets. Pilots moving up from these King Airs should have no problem at all stepping from one cockpit into another. By the end of the year, Raytheon says that 11 of the Pro Line 21-equipped King Airs will be delivered. The new B200's price is set at $5.05 million; the model 350 goes for $5.8 million.
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