Sandel Avionics Inc. News

Provided by Aero News Network

By John Croft
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A light single-engine turbine helicopter buzzes a lake and pulls up to strafe the nearby craggy mountain peaks on moonless January night.  Conditions that might otherwise be ingredients of an all-too-familiar chain of events leading to a crash site, on this particular night were rendered harmless by the 3-in., brightly colored back-lit display on the bottom right side of N547SA’s panel.

 Getting Helicopter TAWS Right_BCA May 2013

Article provided by Aviation Week Business & Commercial Aviation. May 2013

While most aviation safety sources have identified loss of control (LOC) as the leading cause of accidents in the past few years, controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) “is making a strong comeback,” according to Flight Safety Foundation fellow Jim Burin. At the FSF’s Business Aviation Safety Seminar in Montreal last week, he cited recent accidents such as the loss of the Sukhoi Superjet SSJ-100 airliner demonstrator in May last year when the crew ignored multiple automated terrain warnings and flew the airplane into a mountain in Indonesia with the loss of all 45 people aboard. 

VISTA, Cal., April 17, 2013– Sandel Avionics, Inc., a global leader in compact, integrated display systems technologies, today announced that Eurocopter will offer its SN4500 Primary Navigation Displays and SA4550 Primary Attitude Displays as optional equipment on EC135 helicopters. Sandel products are now offered in Eurocopter’s Blue Book, as part of the Mid-life Efficiency Package (MEP) for new production EC135 models.

Those words all by themselves are relatively benign — but when a pilot hears them in a headset, it is enough to cause an increase in heart rate and send their blood pressure into the stratosphere. Helicopters are usually flown low to the ground and the nature of a helicopter pilots’ work takes them into some hazardous flying environments. Since the time of the Wright Brothers and Igor Sikorsky, aircraft safety rules have been written in blood. Over the years, vast improvements in aircraft design and instrumentation have made flying and helicopter flying, in particular, safer. Sandel HeliTAWS is one of those improvements that helps pilots avoid controlled flight into terrain (CFIT.)