Frank Robinson speaking at the company's
10,000th helicopter celebration

Enlarge Photo

At its press conference at Heli-Expo on Sunday, Robinson Helicopter president Kurt Robinson talked flat-panel displays, something that his father, Frank Robinson, who founded the company almost single-handedly 40 years ago, seldom did, except to say that they were not suitable for Robinson helicopters. “You need to be looking outside when you’re flying a helicopter,” he told a throng of reporters at HAI in Houston a few years ago, making the clear implication that when you’re flying with a flat-panel display, you’re not paying attention to what you needed to be paying attention to, which was what has happening outside and not inside the helicopter. It wasn’t the first or last time that Frank Robinson made a statement of that kind.

The elder Robinson, now 82 years of age, wasn’t as Heli-Expo this year. It was the first time he’d missed one of these shows in, well, as long as any one could remember. And he was missed.

So when Frank’s son Kurt spoke about flat panel avionics, I listened. Not only was I interested in what Kurt had to say — he is a keen observer of the market, the low-end of which Robinson dominates — but I was interested in how his views would diverge from those of his father. The contrast was subtle but telling. Let me explain.

Helicopters are different animals than fixed-wing airplanes and require a different level of attention to detail, even in so-called straight and level flight than fixed-wing aircraft do. If you think that our Cessna and Pipers are unstable, imagine taking your hands off the yoke and rudder pedals for a good long while and then visualize what will happen. Unless you’re also visualizing having the autopilot on, it won’t be a pretty picture. And in a helicopter, constant control is even more critical. Moreover, you need to remember that while we often cruise along at 5,500 feet a mile above the terrain in straight and level flight, in many cases, helicopters are down there mixing it up with the trees, overpasses and power lines. The margins are slim and the penalties for inattention are assessed on the spot.

So when Frank Robinson said that he didn’t like instruments that keep a pilot’s eyes anywhere but outside, he has a number of compelling reasons to say so.

To think that Kurt Robinson would dismiss those concerns lightly is not to understand him or his father’s imprint on the company. When it comes to safety, Robinson is a deeply conservative organization. So Kurt’s willingness to look at flat-panel solutions in his company’s products is a departure from Frank’s point of view. At the same time, it’s not a 180-degree shift by any stretch of the imagination. Instead, it’s an evolutionary change, one that attempts to take in all the relevant information

What he wants to know includes the biggest questions, unanswered in his mind still: What are these instruments? What do they do for the customer in terms of safety? In terms of payload? In terms of cost?  In terms of utility and capability? How do they affect dependability? Serviceability? Warranty? They’re all good questions, and Robinson is looking deeply into all of them before it makes the decision to go ahead and make flat panels an option. It’s a decision I’m pretty certain it will make but not before it’s confident that it is an informed decision and that it has the right product or products to start with.

The calculus involved mirrors that which fixed-wing light airplane manufacturers made nearly a decade ago when they began installing flat-panel avionics in their products—Cirrus was first with the Avidyne Entegra suite, and it was, it turned out, a great call. Today you can barely find a new airplane without a flat panel avionics system. They make sense in every which way.

And it mirrors the calculus that we owners of existiing airplanes need to make before taking the flat-panel plunge. Is this what we really want? As opposed to the case for or against GPS navigators, like the ubiquitous Garmin GNS 430, the case for flat-panels is more difficult to figure, in large part because the expense is greater but also because the benefits aren't as obvious, especially for those of us who are VFR-only flyers. Losing an attitude gyro is inconvenient perhaps and an unwelcome expense, but it's not an emergency. When you're in the soup, that equation changes dramatically. Then again when you start to figure in the benefits, all the extra information, the built in safety net for inadvertant VFR into IMC and the one-stop shopping for all your flight instrument information, not to mention the weight savings, improved reliability and resale value, the conclusion gets a lot easier to reach.

So while it’s taken a decade longer for helicopter makers, a conservative group if ever there were one, to get on board the flat-panel train, it hasn’t been for lack of interest. Now that there’s a wealth of information and a decade of evolution on these next-generation avionics, I think we’ll see them becoming the de facto standard in helicopter panels in no time. It’s Economics 101. There’s just too much benefit for too good a price.