Reno, USA, March 2014: AIR Avionics introduces AIR Glide – the new avionics suite for soaring at the SSA Convention in Reno, USA.

AIR Glide is a flexible product line of soaring instruments that combines variometer, navigation, traffic avoidance and flight logging into one system. With the introduction of the “Butterfly Vario” back in 2011, Butterfly Avionics – one of the two partner companies in the new AIR Avionics group – marked the foundation for AIR Glide. “Butterfly Vario” has now become part of AIR Glide.

With AIR Glide there is no distinction between “variometer” and “glide computer” in cockpits anymore. The heart of every AIR Glide installation, the sensor unit, contains all sensors and an IGC certified flight recorder. This Sensor unit can be combined with any number of displays in any size.

Next to the already available small “Display S” with focus on vario indication, two larger display sizes “Display M” and “Display L” with 3.7“ and 5.7“ screen size and focus on navigation will be available later this year. Planned release date for the large displays is end of 2014.

Both displays have been in development for many years and are now nearly finished. Tobias Fetzer, head of development at Butterfly Avionics:

“The main goal when developing the new AIR Glide software for Display M and L was simplicity and ease of use. A radically new user interface with many new ideas makes using the devices very easy and intuititve.”

In addition to the well known, revolutionary sensor technology, that has already been used in “Butterfly Vario”, easy to use navigation with sophisticated competition functions is added.

The flexibility of the proprietary developed AIR Glide software allows for using all system functions on all available displays. This means pilots can use one or two or even more displays in one aircraft just as desired. Displays S and M are direct drop in replacements to older systems using 2.25“ or 3.125“ standard panel cutouts.