On the Record with
Denny Helgeson, Vice President and General Manager, Business and Regional Systems, Rockwell Collins

After 27 years with Rockwell Collins, Denny Helgeson has reached the pinnacle as far as the business aviation market is concerned -- he's attending his first NBAA convention as vice president and general manager of Rockwell Collins' Business and Regional Systems.

Helgeson is the second business/regional vice president in a row to come from the company's government systems side of the organization.

"That's an indication of what (president) Clay Jones is doing with Rockwell Collins," Helgeson told Show News. "We're becoming more of one company whether it's the commercial or government side. The processes and much of the technology are transparent across the businesses."

So what has Helgeson discovered about Business and Regional Systems in his early days on the job?

On the plus side is the organization's "focus on the customer" and "excellent long-term relationships with customers." There's also "cross-leveraging across businesses to find areas where we can work across market segments" and providing value to customers by "keeping costs in line with what customers expect."

On the challenging side: "Lean is always a journey," said Helgeson, adding, "We have many opportunities to be more efficient in how we delivery products to customers, to get technology and new capabilities to customers more quickly."

Satisfying those customer requests becomes increasingly urgent as the economy stays soft.

"We've been through a rough year as an industry," Helgeson said. "The air transport market continues to be challenged, and even in the business market we're seeing some softness. We have to manage our way through this downturn and continue to invest in the company so we're well positioned for the upturn.

One area to which Rockwell Collins intends to devote its efforts in the near term is connectivity to the airplane -- getting data to and from both the flight deck and the cabin. The company initiative in that area was called "eFlight" at last year's NBAA, and it was designed to augment the capabilities of its Pro Line 21 and Pro Line 21 Continuum avionics suites. With the recent acquisition of Airshow, which Collins closed over the summer, the company's efforts have expanded to a greater extent in the area of satellite delivery of product, such as through Inmarsat's 64Kbps service.

Important to that effort is development of a Rockwell Collins digital "backbone" that the company hopes will be installed in new-production aircraft by airframers such as Gulfstream and Cessna. The idea is to improve reliability to the customer in the cabin.

"Once you get [data] on the airplane, how do you get it routed around the aircraft so the customer has reliable service?" asked Helgeson. "In the front end for the pilots, we've got Ethernet-based architecture that will serve that growth potential well. A similar type of [capability] is needed in the back of the cabin because reliability in cabin systems is a problem since everything is hard-wired and distributed."

Three realities are driving the need for the type of backbone system, says Helgeson: (1) Completion centers are being forced into the time-consuming and expensive process of ripping out cabin interiors to install new electronic cabin systems; (2) Every customer wants something different; and (3) Completion centers have to deal with a multitude of cabin electronics suppliers with the resultant integration problems.

OEMs have been receptive to the idea of installing such a digital backbone during aircraft production, according to Helgeson, especially because customers are not locked into buying Rockwell Collins or Airshow equipment even after the digital backbone is installed.

By Barry Rosenberg