Mark V EGPWS Customer Options Selection:

The Honeywell Mark V EGPWS installation, typically performed as a GPWS upgrade, is accomplished on simulators that have either hardware GPWS LRUs or simulated GPWS systems. This modification gives the aircraft the “enhanced modes” due to having the terrain awareness feature required by regulatory authorities. Terrain maps are presented to the pilots on either EFIS or supplementary displays.

ASC has completed many of these installations on aircraft ranging from Dash 8-400 (Q400) to the Boeing 777 and for most different flight simulator manufacturers. This is a routine installation for ASC.

Customer options selection for the Mark V presents an interesting challenge because there are approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000 combinations of customer options that may be selected for any give aircraft type. Some simulators allow for more than 1 aircraft type to be configured, so that increases the number of possible combination of options even further.

The theory of the programming pin selection for the Mark V allows one program pin to be set to one of 10 possible states. There are 18 programming pins in total (not including a parity pin). The following schematic shows the manner in which the programming pins are laid out:

The ASC Genio is the solution to the Mark V customer options dilemma. A pair of small circuit cards mounted in the vicinity of the EGPWS computer allow any of the customer options to be easily selected from the IOS . Customer options data sent from the host computer via Ethernet or RS232 is received by the Genio and presented to the EGPWS computer such that the requested options are set during the next power up sequence of the EGPWS computer.

The Genio is a clean solution to a complex problem: