Farnborough 2008 Show News - July 17, 2008 - (Page 20)

FA R N B O R O U G H 2 0 0 8 ON THE RECORD— Jean-Pierre Mortreaux, President & CEO, CMC Electronics CMC Helps Manage Cockpit Data Making cockpits more manageable is paying off for Montreal-based CMC Electronics, which has scored several milestones and major victories this year with its electronic flight bags and integration of cockpits, especially in modern military training aircraft. Add in flight management systems, enhanced vision, small and lightweight headu p d i s p l a y s a n d C M C ’s capabilities in integrating them, and one sees how the CMC’s TacView. company has become the major player in several niche markets. “We have been growing at seven to 10% a year for the last five years in a row, and we see that continuing,” said president and CEO Jean-Pierre Mortreaux. That goal received a major boost here at Farnborough with the announcement that CMC will supply its new TacView 5-by-7-in portable plug-and-play display and keyboard to Lockheed Martin for the C-130J Hercules. TacView is intended for use in military transports, helicopters and fast jets, and can be mounted on the panel, a sidewall bracket or on a pilot’s kneepad. List price is around $25,000. “It really is not expensive,” said Mortreaux. It is making its first appearance here at the Show. Based on CMC’s Class 2 PilotView system, TacView for the C-130J will streamline the workload of pilots, mission specialists, loadmasters and troop commanders by hosting functions such as precision air-drop, portable mission planning, digital moving map, real-time weather imagery, sensor imaging and DoD-supplied aeronautical charts. Earlier this year CMC completed deliveries of TacView to the U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command for its AC-130 Gunship aircraft. CMC hit the 1,000delivery mark earlier this CMC’s Mortreaux. year for its PilotView electronic flight bag for commercial and business aviation customers, and will now produce about 1,000 a year, said CMC’s Super Tucano cockpit. Héroux-Devtek for Embraer Gear Canadian supplier Héroux-Devtek has won a contract to design, build, supply and support landing gear assemblies for the new Embraer Legacy 450 and Legacy 500 business jet programs. The deal marks a departure for Embraer, which generally builds its own landing gear systems. Héroux-Devtek is based in Longueuil, Quebec, close to engine supplier Pratt & Whitney Canada and also to Bombardier—perhaps Embraer’s main business rival. In June Héroux-Devtek won a contract to build the landing gear for the new Bombardier Learjet 85 business aircraft. The company also has a $109-million contract to build aerostructures for various Bombardier business and regional aircraft. Unsurprisingly, Martin Brassard, general manager of the Héroux-Devtek landing gear division, considers the Embraer deal a strategic breakthrough, saying, “The business jet market is Héroux-Devtek CEO Gilles Labbé with landing gear vp Martin Brassard, sales vp Jean Gravel, Embraer president Frederico Curado, and Jim Prentice, Canada’s Minister of Industry. experiencing vigorous growth, and we’ve rapidly built an important presence in that niche.” Embraer’s Legacy 450, formerly called the Mid-Light Jet (MLJ), is expected to enter service in late 2013. Deliveries of the slightly larger Legacy 500, the former Mid-Size Jet (MSJ), are slated to begin in the second half of 2012. —Paul Richfield Mortreaux. Also growing is CMC’s business of developing lightweight integrated cockpits (including head-up displays and mission computers) for military training aircraft, where space and weight are at a premium. Its first major victory on the T-6A Texan II has been followed by the Aermacchi M-311, the Korean KT-1C for the Turkish Air Force, and with avionics on the Pilatus PC-21. A makeover for the Royal Air Force’s Tucano trainers is being proposed with Marshall’s of Cambridge, which is here at Farnborough showing a “TMk.2” glass cockpit developed and integrated by CMC. Mortreaux pointed to avionics retrofits as another growing market, especially for global positioning system (GPS) navigation and flight management products. Here at Farnborough the company announced its selection by Lockheed Martin to supply a dual installation, civil certified GPS sensor on the C-130J Hercules for new aircraft as well as retrofits. The CMC IntegriFlight CMA-5024 GPS landing system sensor provides Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) GPS capability to civil standards. CMC is also planning to invest more in its Flight Management System in the future. The company’s CMA-9000 unit was selected by Lufthansa for retrofit on 14 A300-600 aircraft. A variant of this unit has also been chosen by Thales for its avionics suite on the Sukhoi Superjet 100. Mortreaux notes that CMC has benefited from its acquisition in February 2007 by Esterline Corp., headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. The two companies have begun to leverage each others’ systems engineering capability to win more cockpit integration business. —John Morris 20 July 17, 2008 www.aviationweek.com/shownews http://www.aviationweek.com/shownews

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