July 28th, 2011
The daily newspaper at AirVenture 2011, AirVenture Today, had an article on the synthetic vision system we developed for WingX Pro7 for the iPad:
“Is there any limit to what a pilot can do with an iPad? Maybe not.
Hilton Software President Hilton Goldstein recently announced a synthetic vision upgrade for the company’s WingX Pro 7 application. The software upgrade is free, but the synthetic vision subscription costs $99.95 per year (on top of the annual
WingX subscription of $99.95). So for $200 per year you can not only have all your charts downloaded, but (if your iPad has GPS) you can also have a geo-referenced synthetic vision view of the surrounding terrain.
It gets a bit complicated from here, but this version of synthetic vision is more or less “pilot controlled,” meaning you can scroll and zoom up and down to see the terrain all around you. You control the “altitude” and heading yourself on the tape displays to represent your actual flight path. For an additional $700 or so, you can purchase a remote (Bluetooth linked) attitude heading reference system (AHRS) device that will link to the iPad for pitch and roll information.
The graphics of the synthetic vision are impressive and include runways and obstacles. Goldstein said future WingX upgrades will add XM Weather capability and even a traffic alert display, with appropriate receivers.”
You can find the article online here.