Aspen Avionics Evolution EFD1000
Aspen touts its EFD1000 retrofittable primary flight display as small, capable, easy to install and affordable. Can it live up to that kind of hype?

By Robert Goyer
Photographed by Robert Goyer
May 2009

It's not very often that an aviation company comes up with an idea that simply hasn't been tried before -- after all, not much in aviation is really new -- but Aspen Avionics thinks that it has hit upon that elusive next big thing. In this case, however, the next big thing happens to be quite small.

Founded by Peter Lyons and Jeff Bethel just a few years ago, Aspen was envisioned as a company that would use new technology to create capable and value-rich avionics for the retrofit market. The first product it certified was an ingenious TAWS display that included an integral vertical speed instrument, allowing operators an easy and affordable way to plug a dedicated terrain display right into the VSI spot in the panel.

But the idea that has captured the attention of pilots is the Evolution display, a self-contained LCD primary flight display with built-in AHRS and air data, and offered at a price that would make even Skyhawk owners take notice. And to make the business plan work, Aspen needed to have the system certified to be installed not only in Skyhawks, but in hundreds of other models.

If the goal was to accomplish just those things, Aspen has already succeeded: It earned FAA approval for the EFD1000 primary flight display last year, and it recently won European approval for it, as well. In earning certification for its little PFD, Aspen has indeed achieved what many in the industry thought was, maybe not impossible, but certainly improbable.

But success in this business is defined not by what the government says is flight-worthy but by what airplane owners, voting with their wallets, choose to put in their panels.

So even if, in theory, the Aspen PFD is a compelling product, is it one that pilots would want to put in the panels of their existing airplanes? Is it one that I would put in the panel of my airplane?

You can see the screen, after we turned off the master, has reverted to backup power mode. It's now operating under its own power independent of the airplane's power; the system as installed in Scott's Cirrus SR22 (top of page).

What You Get
When I first heard some preliminary details about Aspen's plans for its as-yet-to-be named primary flight display, I was intrigued. And I naturally assumed that the product would be a bare bones display that would be wired to remote sensors. I was wrong on both counts.

Despite its small format, the EFD1000 offers a wealth of information. It is essentially a six-pack condensed down to fit in the space formerly occupied by just two instruments. It gives you a full-featured horizontal situation instrument (with dual pointers and map data), a digital attitude indicator with flight director capability, altimeter, airspeed indicator, vertical speed, and turn and bank.

Not everything goes in the unit. There are a couple of remote devices. The remote sensor module (RSM) mounts like a GPS antenna on the top of the airplane. It houses a backup GPS receiver and antenna, a flux sensor and accelerometers for position information, as well as an outside air temp probe. The RSM allows the PFD to maintain basic functionality in an emergency when the primary nav sources are lost. The PFD itself has a built-in backup battery that will operate the unit for a minimum of 30 minutes.

There are two other small external devices: an optional analog converter unit (ACU), which is needed in order to convert analog nav signals, such as output by a number of still-common nav radios, into digital signals to pass along to the PFD; as well as a small configuration attached to the wiring bundle that remembers the airplane's configuration information.

The entire package including the displays weighs less than 10 pounds. On most installations, the weight difference will be a wash or a slight improvement.

Flying Aspen Glass
One of the concerns that many pilots have when looking at a photograph of the EFD1000 is the apparent small size of the instrument system. And it's a question I shared. I was curious about whether the unit would be big enough to see clearly and whether its smaller size would lessen some of the important benefits of having glass in the first place.

I met Aspen's Scott Smith up in Tulsa, Oklahoma (KRVS), to try out the system as installed in the 2003 Cirrus SR22 that Scott flies on a regular basis. To get up to Tulsa I flew up from Austin in my PlaneSmart shared ownership Cirrus G3 Turbo SR22, equipped with the Avidyne Entegra flat-panel avionics system. The Entegra system, which features a pair of 10.4-inch diagonal displays and lots of additional capability, presented an opportunity for a little comparing and contrasting with the Aspen glass.

Scott's SR22 was originally equipped with the Sandel electronic HSI and an electromechanical attitude indicator. The Aspen EFD1000 Pro takes the place of the Sandel -- which, like any HSI, has some resale value, which will help cut the cost of the Aspen installation. The attitude instrument was moved to the spot the VSI formerly occupied (just below the altimeter), and the Aspen unit takes the two center spots.

Scott has the Pro model EFD1000 in his airplane. It is by far the best seller for Aspen, so my observations will be to it and not to the entry level Pilot model or the yet-to-be released ATP version.

The single piece of Aspen glass is segmented into "two" electronic instruments, the HSI and the attitude indicator. Sound like an even swap, two mechanical instruments for two mechanical instruments?

Hardly. The benefits you get in the exchange are numerous, and they give the pilot several new safety tools. The EFD1000 gives you:
• A solid-state attitude heading reference system (AHRS) with no moving parts for greater reliability in the most critical instrument in the airplane.
• Digital air data.
• Altitude pre-select and altitude alerting, which can interface with the autopilot, as well.
• Backup power, attitude, heading, GPS reception and OAT.
• Altitude, airspeed and vertical speed bugs for reference.
• With many autopilots, you get free roll steering -- also known as GPS steering -- which allows a compatible autopilot to follow the flight plan on the GPS. For autopilots with no roll steering, the Aspen PFD eliminates the need for a separate roll steering converter.
• Readout of indicated and true airspeed.
• Wind arrow and wind speed.
• Track deviation indication.
• Display of flight plan waypoints and nearest airports on the HSI.
• A minimums bug and decision height annunciation.
• Optional single-cue flight director.

And these are just some of the additional features you get with the glass.

Is it worth it? For the price of the unit, around $10,000 for the Pro version, I don't know if there's a pilot out there who would answer anything but in the affirmative. The product has a remarkable set of features at a price that's comparable to that of a new panel-mount navigator. It is, in fact, about the same price as fully featured HSIs.

Taken on the RNAV Runway 13 approach to Muskogee (under VFR), this photograph illustrates the sophistication and capability of the Aspen EFD1000 display system. Note the clear and useful presentation of the waypoints on the approach, the easily identifiable vertical (glideslope) and lateral (localizer) indicators on the attitude indicator, and the wealth of basic information on the data bar in the center of the display.

Is Smaller Big Enough?
These are all great bonuses, but the big question is, is the display itself large enough to do the job?

You might think that I, after my flight up to Tulsa behind Avidyne's 10.4-inch glass, would be sensitive to the smaller size of the Aspen PFD -- the glass in it is 6 inches diagonally -- but the truth is, I never thought twice about it.

That fact says a lot about the display, and in order to get all of the information to fit on the display, Aspen had to do a few things exactly right.

For starters, it had to get a great screen, and it did. The EFD1000 is bright; even in direct sunlight its colors are vibrant and the images on it are tack sharp. Without a great display, the small size would have been a deal breaker.

But that wasn't enough. It also had to get the symbology on the displays just right, making them easily interpretable while making them small enough that there was enough room for the other symbology and data fields. And there's a lot to get in, in addition to the HSI and attitude displays, with airspeed and altitude tapes, bugs, nav symbols, text V-speeds and much more.

One of the keys to success is the dividing line between the two virtual instruments, the black data bar, which does a nice job of visually separating the attitude indicator and HSI while giving you your true and indicated airspeeds, outside air temp and a wind arrow with the wind speed and direction.

As to the big question: Is small glass workable? In this case, the answer is yes. I found myself focusing on just the right part of the display at the right time and easily, despite having spent little time with the display before.

Aspen might go a step further, saying not only is a small package sufficient, but that in some ways it might be advantageous because it allows you to take in a lot of information simultaneously without having to move your eyes more than a few inches, or fractions of an inch, left, right, up or down. And at least to some degree, I have to agree. It was very easy to make sense of.

On our first practice RNAV instrument approach to Muskogee, we let the autopilot fly the legs of the T-style approach -- remember, it's got roll-steering capability. With a little guidance from Scott, I put in the baro minimums, loaded the approach on the Garmin GNS 430 (old hat for this Cirrus driver) and followed along. If there were any issues, it was with the S-Tec 55 flying a straight line and not with the display, which gave a clear and easy to interpret picture of the approach underway, even laying out the approach waypoints on the HSI screen as we flew through the sequence.

After a touch-and-go, I hand-flew the next one, and even though we turned in a little tight, I was able to rescue a slightly too high and too fast approach (under totally visual conditions with a safety pilot, mind you) flying the clear indications on the EFD1000 like a glideslope throughout the vertical nav approach. It is a serious and capable system.

Layout
Without going into too much minutia about which button to push to do what, suffice it to say that the design and the layout of the physical controls are just as well thought out as the symbology.

A pair of concentric knob buttons located along the bottom of the display control the inputs. The one on the right, for instance, allows you to enter the baro setting, set bugs and change heading. Just tap on the inner knob to go to the next function. It cycles through, so you never have to go backward, and the selection resets to "heading" after a few seconds of no input. The left-hand knob allows you to input the course or airspeed bug and to sync the various settings. It's easy to figure out.

Along the right side of the instrument are several small, vertically oriented keys that are only slightly less readable than the concentric knobs. They allow you to perform common tasks, such as decluttering the screen, inputting approach minimums or toggling between the 360 and arc modes on the HSI. The labels are a little small here, but once you know what you're looking for, they're easy to spot and punch.

The rest of the operation, really, is coordinating the use of the autopilot and the navigators with the PFD, which is little different than with the big glass Avidyne displays in the Cirrus I normally fly.

Do I prefer the large glass? I do. Would I be elated to have had an EFD1000 in my old Cherokee Six instead of steam gauges? There's no question about it.

Installation
There are actually several big ideas behind the EFD1000, but arguably the biggest is the way in which it's installed, by removing the two main flight instruments, the HSI and the attitude indicator, and plugging the EFD into the space that results. The LCD sits flat on the top of the panel surface and the display's "can," the tin-can sized enclosure that contains the guts of the unit, goes into the hole vacated by the former attitude indicator.

The EFD1000 fits into the hole vacated by the two center flight instruments. The connections are simple and the unit features its own cooling fan, a must for such a densely packaged system. A battery backup keeps the system working up to half an hour after losing ship's power.

The appeal to this approach will be apparent to anyone who has ever had to do surgery to the panel in their airplane: You don't need to cut metal to install the new display. Cutting new holes in the existing panel, moving instruments, rewiring instrument clusters and installing adapters all cause installation costs to increase precipitously. The Aspen approach either eliminates or greatly reduces the likelihood or cost and complexity of any of these operations.

In most installations, you keep most of your old instruments and just move a couple of them to new spots. In a typical job, the old mechanical HSI just goes away and the iron gyro attitude indicator moves over a row and serves as a backup, taking over the spot formerly occupied by the VSI.

With what Aspen refers to as a "one-tube" installation, namely, just the EFD1000 in the center column, the requirement, to paraphrase, is for there to be backup attitude and airspeed information within easy view of the pilot. For all intents and purposes, that means the AI and the airspeed need to go right next to the new PFD. Which is no problem, because there's no longer need for a VSI.

Once Aspen gets its multifunction display certified -- and it expects that to happen soon -- that instrument would, in most installations, provide all the redundancy required to get rid of the mechanical backups. That's because the MFD -- in addition to being a multifunction map unit, with engine instruments, weather, moving maps and more -- will be able to take on the job of reversionary PFD with the push of a button. And because it will have its own dedicated AHRS, air data and backup power supply, there would be no loss of function when going to the backup. Look for a full report on that product when it becomes available.

Like other factory-installed PFDs, the Aspen EFD1000 will work with WAAS navigators, displaying the glideslope-like vertical deviation indicator when an APV approach is active. It can also be configured to display the required WAAS GPS annunciations, in some cases saving owners the need to install external annunciators for WAAS. 

There is the challenge of packing it all into the small space allotted. There's the computer board, processor, AHRS, the air data unit and all the associated jacks and wiring. And once it's all in there, you've got to keep it all cool. It's a tall order, but it seems to be working.

And there were, not surprisingly, some teething pains along the way. We've spoken to a couple of avionics shop owners who told us that some of the early installations were complicated and involved substantial extra time spent tracking down and fixing glitches. More recent installs, they said, have gone a great deal more smoothly.

Above, you can see how clean the installation looks in a Bonanza.

The EFD1000 also eliminates much, though not all, of the hassle associated with finding places for remote boxes. You do need to install the remote sensor module (RSM), which is mounted on the top of the fuselage, and run shielded cabling, which has to be installed beneath the headliner in most cases. And in pressurized airplanes, it's a little more complicated still. Almost everything else is contained right inside the unit.

In terms of dollars and cents, Smith warned me that costs vary depending on the specifics of the airplane being retrofitted, but he said that in a typical installation customers might expect to tack on between $3,000 and $5,000 to the $9,995 EFD1000. Downtime, he said, is proving to be about a week. As always, it's the avionics shop that will quote the price, and expect competition among shops to increase as they become more experienced with the installations and more secure in how long it will take their avionics technicians to complete the job. It goes without saying that the final deal is the one you work out with your avionics shop.

Bright Future
Getting back to my original question: Is the EFD1000 a product that pilots would want to put in their panel? The answer is an unequivocal "yes." There are other options that give pilots more glass to gaze at, and those options will appeal to many owners. But they cost more; in most cases, a lot more. For many owners, a $50,000 retrofit display system just doesn't make sense as a ratio of the value of their airplane. The calculus is very different for a $15,000 investment, a fact we know from the phenomenal success of the Garmin GNS 430 navigator.

And Aspen is working hard to give a lot of owners the option to go with glass. Today the EFD systems can be installed in around 650 different models, including a growing number of heavier and faster airplanes. Aspen has recently added some twins, including Aerostars, Beech 58 Barons and some Twin Commanders. And Aspen says that it is "aggressively" pursuing additional approvals. The model is the same that S-Tec used in making its value-priced, full-featured, rate-based autopilots big aftermarket hits. Make a good product that can be installed cost effectively in a large number of airplanes and the business will come.

It's clear that Aspen was setting the bar high when it set out to certify the EFD1000 and to make it fly in hundreds of airplanes. From our perspective, the company didn't just succeed at this ambitious goal; it knocked it out of the park.

What's next for Aspen? In addition to adding more approvals to its list, it's also working on a couple of new products, the fully reversionary MFD/PFD I discussed, and a new PFD model, the ATP, expected later this year, which will boast synthetic vision, terrain, topographical maps with nav data, weather and additional autopilot interface capabilities, all for a projected price of $12,995.

To find out more about Aspen's products visit its website, aspenavionics.com.

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