Garmin Adapts G5000 for New Bell 525

Garmin announced the new G5000H helicopter avionics suite at Heli-Expo today, coinciding with the launch of the Bell 525 Relentless. The new helicopter is the launch customer for the G5000H. According to Garmin, the Bell 525 will feature a four-display system and incorporate Bell’s new awareness, reactive and control (ARC) cockpit. Garmin is displaying the G5000H in a 12-inch screen configuration this week at Heli-Expo, but displays are also available in 14-inch size. The G5000H includes touchscreen control, voice command and an automatic flight control system that will be a first for a Garmin helicopter avionics system. Other G5000H features include Garmin’s Telligence Voice Command speech recognition and 3-D audio, multipane display capability and full engine instrumentation. Adapting the fixed-wing G5000 system to helicopters required “an awful lot of redesign to make it specific to the helicopter market,” said Garmin avionics product manager Bill Stone. “We’ve had to re-engineer a lot of the black boxes because of the severe environment in which rotorcraft operate.” The attitude and heading reference system (AHRS) also had to be redesigned, as did the synthetic vision system.