Avidyne Announces DFC90 Autopilot for Entegra-Equipped Piper Matrix & Mirage Aircraft

About the DFC90

The DFC90 is an attitude-based digital autopilot system that is designed as a replacement for the S-TEC55X autopilot. The DFC90 has all the standard vertical and lateral modes of operation of a turbine-class autopilot system, including Flight Director (FD), Altitude Hold (ALT), Airspeed Hold (IAS), Vertical Speed Hold (VS), Heading (HDG), Navigation (NAV, APPR, LOC/GS, GPSS), and Control Wheel Steering (CWS).

Customers upgrading from the STEC 55X will notice several major performance and feature improvements including:

*Greatly improved stability due to the use of attitude data to control the autopilot inner control loops. This is particularly evident and important when tracking an ILS to minimums in windy conditions.

*The new Indicated Airspeed Hold (IAS) vertical mode includes a dedicated Airspeed knob and a new airspeed bug on the PFD, and provides a more elegant way to make Flight Level changes.

*The flight director capability of the DFC90 is vastly improved and greatly improves the ability to hand-fly approaches.

*The“Straight & Level” button overrides all autopilot modes and levels the aircraft in both pitch and roll from a wide range of capture attitudes for an added measure of safety.

*“Flight Envelope Protection & Alerting” virtually eliminates autopilot-induced stalls (underspeed) and overspeeds. With Flight Envelope Protection, the autopilot avoids exceeding the flight envelope while providing visual and aural warnings to the pilot.

There several other improvements, such as a dedicated Vertical Speed knob, pitch hold mode, wide autopilot engagement, a dedicated GPSS button, automatic Back Course Approach selection, multiple color annunciations to indicate armed and active states, intercept mode annunciations, and Avidyne’s hallmark ease of use.

About Avidyne Corporation. Avidyne’s continuing leadership in innovation and its Flying Made Simple™ system design make flying safer, more accessible and more enjoyable for pilots and their passengers. The company’s expanding line of products include the industry-leading Entegra integrated flight deck line for new and existing aircraft, datalink-capable EX5000 and EX500 multi-function displays and the dual-antenna TAS600 series of active traffic advisory systems, the MLB700 broadcast datalink receiver, the MLX770 world-wide datalink transceiver, and the TWX670 Tactical Weather Detection system. Headquartered in Lincoln, MA, the company has facilities in Westerville, OH, Melbourne, FL, and Boulder, CO. www.avidyne.com