After all, it already is a flat-panel avionics system.
Proline glass cockpit king air upgrade#
It will be hard, though not impossible, for owners of Pro Line 21 airplanes to upgrade to any of the four flat-panel retrofit systems featured here. If you were learning Pro Line 21 after getting handy with, say, Garmin G1000, it might feel as though you’d gone back to the days of DOS, with line entry and text menu systems required at just about every turn.
The Collins Pro Line 21 system, which had been standard for many years on King Airs before the introduction of Rockwell Collins’ new Pro Line Fusion by Textron, is a terrific system. One is that they have autopilots, often really good autopilots, and retrofit autopilots are expensive to develop and won’t do much the original one couldn’t also do, which makes it hard to justify the expense, right? The second issue is that some of the avionics systems are just really good. There are two major problems with the avionics systems in existing (doesn’t “existing” sound better than “used?”) King Airs. (One of the companies featured here might beg to differ on this point.) For while it’s possible to completely redo an airplane as substantial as the King Air from the airframe up, it’s probably not economically feasible to do that. If it’s got good bones and serviceable engines, it makes a lot of sense to fix it up rather than buying a new one, so long as you’re willing, that is, to live with certain compromises, the chief one being the lack of all the latest safety and quality-of-life features. That’s so long as operators are willing to pay the way for two engines instead of one, an economic move that hundreds of owners of the Pilatus PC12, a single-engine large cabin turboprop, have opted to do.Īs owners of many light jets have discovered, a well-built airplane is much more like a house than a car. Later model-year examples, from the late ’70s and up, represent a great value on the used market. If the key word in the preceding paragraph isn’t “capable,” it might just be “rugged.” King Airs even from the early days are still around. For many years it was the only GA turboprop twin being manufactured, and today its competition is tiny compared to the market share the King Air owns. Rugged, roomy and capable, the King Air was still the king, though, and it easily outlasted the competition, outlasted it by decades, in fact. Models from Cessna (now a sister company under Textron) and Piper were faster and sexier. After all this time, it’s still one of the most successful models in the world. Textron Aviation is still manufacturing the King Air in three different versions from the owner-flown C90 GTx up through the type-rating-required 350i. One of the most famous planes in aviation history, the Beechcraft King Air has been around for more than 50 years now, and in a surprisingly small number of iterations considering its success.
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