Novel Features for Aircraft-Crew Interaction Provided by the Airbus Helicopters Helionix Avionics Suite

Airbus Helicopters' new Helionix® avionics suite was developed with the key objectives of improving flight safety and mission effectiveness. To achieve this goal, the development focused on reducing workload and complexity, improving situation awareness and increasing mission involvement. This allows flight crews to concentrate on flying the helicopter and completing the mission. Helionix is currently installed on the new Airbus Helicopters H145 and H175. A key feature of Helionix is that all essential information is displayed on a single Flight and Navigation Display (FND), thereby making the other displays available to display vehicle, navigation or mission related information at the pilot's discretion. A high integration of information on a single display was achieved by the introduction of various novel technologies. The part time display allowed various "mandatory" parameters to be monitored in the background, the fused power indicator made torque, TOT and N1 gauges indications redundant, automatic reconfiguration and automatic pre-flight testing further reduced pilot workload.