| BEN DANIEL, BUSINESS MANAGER, AVIONICS
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applications continue to be strong. Test and simulation applications are continuing both in support of fielded systems and for new systems development as the aerospace companies continue to execute on their business, though they have been more reserved with their expenditures over the global economic reset. |
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What global opportunities do you see for avionics products? |
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Not surprisingly, we have a large business in US-based customers and also in European-based customers. We have seen pockets of Europe strengthening. Exciting commercial opportunity looks to be building outside of the US in South and North America as the smaller jet suppliers vie to compete in the larger market. We expect growth in our business supporting these growing developments. Also, commercial development is strong in China and we are seeing this in real growth now. |
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What are the main challenges facing the avionics business from a marketing and technology perspective? |
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I have always been a firm believer that success is accomplished through customer focus and service. Over the last year of global economic stress we have seen our customers trying to do more work with less expenditure; for us, in our commitment to support them, this drives a higher support/revenue ratio. It also drives a reset in acquisition costs as the suppliers vie for market share. Of course, being part of GE gives us the strength and global presence to perform in this environment. We work to balance our focus on satisfying these real time demands while actively pursuing opportunities in new growth markets. From a technology perspective, the constant challenge is a naturally slow adoption into a market that relies on proven ,stable, predictable communication methods (protocol and electrical). There are obvious benefits to various new technologies but these are balanced against the absolute need for demonstrated communication reliability. ARINC 664 is a successful example of a new genre, with a modified protocol operating over a new physical layer (e.g. Ethernet), being adopted on large aerospace platforms. Time Triggered technologies have the potential to leverage from there and advance into the next generations of designs. |
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What are the main challenges facing the avionics business from a marketing and technology perspective? |
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I have always been a firm believer that success is accomplished through customer focus and service. Over the last year of global economic stress we have seen our customers trying to do more work with less expenditure; for us, in our commitment to support them, this drives a higher support/revenue ratio. It also drives a reset in acquisition costs as the suppliers vie for market share. Of course, being part of GE gives us the strength and global presence to perform in this environment. We work to balance our focus on satisfying these real time demands while actively pursuing opportunities in new growth markets. From a technology perspective, the constant challenge is a naturally slow adoption into a market that relies on proven ,stable, predictable communication methods (protocol and electrical). There are obvious benefits to various new technologies but these are balanced against the absolute need for demonstrated communication reliability. ARINC 664 is a successful example of a new genre, with a modified protocol operating over a new physical layer (e.g. Ethernet), being adopted on large aerospace platforms. Time Triggered technologies have the potential to leverage from there and advance into the next generations of designs. |
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What do you believe your customers want from you? |
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Real time availability of service at competitive/affordable prices. This comes in the form of “off the shelf” product availability, of application-savvy sales people being accessible to help in the selection of the right product, of technically capable staff being available on the phone and on site to address integration needs and custom feature enhancement. All of this is to make the customer’s experience as smooth as possible so they can most simply acquire and use their interface board and get on with their mission-specific developments. Our commitment is to make our customers happy with what we do; the benefit to us is that they then come to us first for their future needs. |
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 GE's Avionics Business Unit is focused on several key application areas within the military, aerospace and commercial segments. Here, Ben Daniel answers questions about the focus of the business, the application areas it serves, what customers are looking for and what are the new technologies and tools that are becoming available. He goes on to overview the global avionics market and its characteristics, and the challenges and opportunities he sees. Finally, Ben looks at what it is that he believes customers want from GE's avionics business.
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What are some of the avionics applications that GE Intelligent Platforms supplies products for? |
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The Avionics Business Unit is focused on several key application areas within the military, aerospace and commercial segments. We concentrate on supplying avionics data bus interface products for embedded, test, and simulation applications. These products enable computers to connect to MIL-STD-1553, ARINC 429, ARINC 664, and time-triggered networks; the connected computers then perform in a variety of specific purposes ranging from data traffic simulation for testing system performance, to sensor management on surveillance aircraft, to in flight entertainment distribution on commercial airlines. We also have advanced data bus analyzers for each of the protocols connecting to the networks over our interface boards in the laboratories, maintenance and repair operations, and on aircraft development lines. |
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What are most customers looking for when they assess their avionics processing needs? |
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Our customers are always looking to create for themselves a sustainable competitive advantage. This leads them to look to shorten their application development timeline and to look for a supplier who understands the requirements of their applications. This is true whether they come out of the data bus test/development camp (often looking for specific features), or whether they come out of the systems camp that just wants to get an interface card and move on (they are not looking for a lot of dialog). Both need to have confidence that we will support them from both a technical perspective in the short run and product lifecycle management perspective in the long run. Focus on our customers is a core element in our avionics products value proposition. We offer high quality products with the very best in performance and functionality, including access to our design team for support or customization. |
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What are some of the new technologies and tools that are entering the avionics fields? |
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As the product line supports a wide variety of test and simulation applications and their respective users, the operating features are constantly being expanded to allow the users to most easily accomplish their objective. This is facilitated by high level APIs and BSPs being provided with every product over a large range of host operating systems and physical interfaces. Constantly improving host physical interfaces such as PCIe surpassing PCI, and ExpressCard replacing PCMCIA, and VPX coming on line as an alternative to cPCI, drive us to be ready with the avionics protocol interface cards on these hosts as they emerge. Similarly, the constant dating of operating systems, ranging from Windows to VxWorks to Linux, drives us to keep the APIs refreshed across our product line. These issues apply regardless of the data bus being supported. As to true new technology in the field at large, Time Triggered technology is probably the most interesting, offering higher performance networking, dependability, and a market approach that derives strength from previous bus infrastructures. |
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Is the avionics market growing? |
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There are a number of facets to the growth of our avionics market. We have built flexibility into our products to be most suitable for test and simulation users. At the same time we have thinned down versions that are in use for embedded applications. The embedded applications definitely have some areas of growth, as for example you see increased fielding of helicopter systems in tactical military applications. Similarly, intelligence / surveillance / reconnaissance |
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