At the Cirrus Owners and Pilots Association (COPA) gathering in Duluth, Minnesota, yesterday, Avidyne announced a new product, the IFD-440. The navigator will boast many of the features of the larger IFD-540, which Avidyne announced at last year’s AirVenture show and which it currently plans to start shipping early next year.
The IFD-440 will be a slide-in replacement for the Garmin GNS430, allowing for what in most cases will likely be a quick and relatively inexpensive upgrade. Avidyne’s decision to launch the product at COPA makes sense. The vast majority of Cirrus SR20s and Cirrus SR22s in the field have a pair of Garmin GNS430 navigators installed. The IFD-440s will allow an easy dual installation with a number of new features, including touchscreen control, and when a pair of IFD-440s is installed, there a numerous benefits in addition to being able to display two separate functions on the navigators, including flight plan interchangeability and the use of one navigator as a keyboard to enter data into the second. The IFD navigators make use of Avidyne’s award-winning R9 FMS and approach logic capabilities. The 440 comes standard with terrain alerting capabilities and can team with Avidyne’s other R9 products and a host of competitors’ units, as well.
The IFD440 sells for $14,995. The bad news, if that all sounds good to you, is that the IFD440 won’t be available until the end of 2013.
