At the NBAA-BACE show in Las Vegas this past October, Honeywell was showing a clean-sheet avionics suite called Anthem, and I almost missed the nearly silent announcement. I wondered why the company didn’t make a bigger deal of it at the show. This worries me because the system—the new standard for integrated avionics partly because it uses a cloud-connected architecture—will fight for some of the market spaces occupied by Garmin, both forward-fit and retrofit, and in cockpits big and small. It should have been bragging about this thing through a megaphone on the convention floor because the thorough demo I saw in private was impressive. There’s a lot on the line.
Kudos to Honeywell product line director Jason Bialek, and the engineering effort behind Honeywell Anthem. From what I saw during the well-presented one-on-one demo of the system in a full-sized cockpit simulator, Anthem’s automotive-inspired ergos (think big-screen-equipped Tesla dashboard) look to be one terrifically executed and smartly integrated avionics suite—more modern and capable than any other my jaded eyes have seen in over 30 years covering the market. We did an overview for this issue of Aviation Consumer, and you can bet we’ll have our eyes and ears on this as Honeywell works on FAA certification.