AVIONICS beechcraft King Air 350i Watch the video here! Touchscreen simplicity comes to the King Air flight deck with the addition of the Rockwell Collins Pro Line Fusion avionics system. Among its features are intuitive graphical flight planning, high-res synthetic vision, a multi-sensor flight management system, and integrated touchscreen checklists . Textron Photo A Touch Glass of Skies flies the King Air 350i equipped with the Pro Line Fusion touch avionics system. By Robert Erdos he merits of the King Air aircraft line are hardly news. Beechcraft, now under Textron’s corporate stewardship, has sold over 7,000 of the iconic turboprop twins since the Model 90 was introduced in 1964. Skies featured a pilot report on the King Air 350i in October 2012 and found it a mature design with terrific utility. But something is new with the King Air: touch avionics. Now featuring the Rockwell Collins Pro Line Fusion avionics system, the King Airs currently have the only touchscreen primary and multifunction displays on a business aircraft. Touch technology is ubiquitous. I imagine that every pilot who has ever used an iPad has shaken his head in dismay about the comparative “state- of-the-art” in avionics. We’ve grown accustomed to poking, pinching, zooming and swiping displays, yet those capabilities didn’t find their way T 36 SKIES Magazine into our cockpits. Apparently, that has changed. Textron’s demonstrator aircraft, King Air 350i registration N1041F, brought its new avionics to Ottawa International Airport on a sunny August day. I flew with Textron demonstration pilot Nathan Schrag. To evaluate the touch avionics, we planned a round-robin flight to Montreal’s Mirabel Airport with an instrument approach at each end. First impressions of the new King Air 350i cockpit were a study in contrasts. The most recent “clean sheet of paper” airplane designs eschew knobs and switches for an almost entirely digital interface. Not so the King Air. It exemplifies the challenges of integrating modern avionics into a legacy airframe; retaining the time-proven and familiar assortment of controls and gauges, whilst adding three bright, beautiful 14.1-inch displays. Arranged in landscape orientation, the displays almost filled the width