A Look at the First ‘Context-Aware’ Avionics Platform for GA

With jets roaring somewhere overhead, FLYING staff visited Airhart Aeronautics’ booth at this year’s EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Four years and two hardware generations after the company began, Airhart president Nate Thuli was there to discuss what he describes as a fundamentally different starting assumption about how a general aviation cockpit should work.

Airhart has been building toward this moment since it emerged from Long Beach, California, with a mission to make personal aircraft “safe, beautiful, and intuitive-to-fly” enough to give more people the freedom of flight. Airhart has spent the last several years building out a fully vertically integrated avionics platform rather than another display that talks to somebody else’s boxes.

Thuli, a former U.S. Air Force program manager who joined as president to steer the company through this rollout, walked FLYING through exactly what that means on the show floor.

“Airhart is all about making aviation safer and making it more accessible,” Thuli said. “Accessibility both in terms of how approachable a system is, from the user interface to the installation, and also in terms of price point. Aviation is not necessarily the most affordable thing to be into, but we’ve done something really compelling with that as well.”

The hardware on display (a 31-inch housing containing two 14-inch displays) is the Airhart platform, and the company describes it as the first “context-aware” avionics system built for general aviation.

Vertical integration, according to Thuli, means Airhart builds and owns every layer of the stack—the display and user interface, the dual flight computers with embedded software-defined radios mounted behind the panel, and the autopilot servos actuating the flight controls, right down to an embedded microcontroller in every single unit. 

“They’re all intelligently connected, smart units,” Thuli said.

Connecting all of it is a single type of network connector and a single type of power connector shared across the entire system. There’s no proprietary one-off wiring harnesses and no third-party hardware in the loop.

“It slots in, it clicks, you know it’s in there, and then it locks in place,” Thuli said, adding that the approach completely eliminates wiring harnesses and the one-off complexity that has long made avionics upgrades a headache for owners and installers.

That simplicity sits on top of some serious engineering underneath. Every component is weather-sealed, down to a one-way pressure venting valve visible on the back of the unit, and the two flight computers are built with enough redundancy that either one, on its own, can power the entire platform if the other goes offline.

“There’s fault tolerance all the way down to the ball bearings in an autopilot servo,” Thuli said.

The depth of integration is what unlocks the context-aware capability. Because the system is watching every stick input, every screen tap, and everything transmitted over the radios, it is continuously building what Thuli called “a comprehensive pilot proficiency evaluation.” It tracks how a pilot performs across nine phases of flight, in real time, including whether they’re alert or starting to lose focus. That data will feed an upcoming pilot dashboard letting owners plan a flight and see a personal proficiency score phase by phase, rather than simply asking whether they’re legal and current. 

“You get a comprehensive look: here’s where you’re very strong, here’s where it really could be good to focus some of your upcoming training,” Thuli said.

The same hardware and software, in a desktop-mounted trainer configuration, is available as an add-on so pilots can build proficiency at home before they fly.

One of the features generating the most attention on the floor addresses the familiar hazard of a pilot mishearing or losing track of an ATC instruction. Rather than depending on data-linked traffic or weather feeds, Airhart’s system uses its own comm radios, intelligently switching antennas for the best reception and functioning as a software-defined radio that monitors additional frequencies even when the pilot isn’t tuned to them. The payoff is a live text transcript of what’s being said including heading and altitude callouts and one-tap autopilot execution. 

“It gives you the opportunity to not only hear what’s going on but also, as the pilot in command, to verify that your eyes agree with what your ears heard,” Thuli said.

The same architecture is designed to catch a subtler problem in rural or mountainous terrain where a radio handoff can be missed or a connection can drop silently.

“Airhart’s able to look at your flight plan and monitor adjacent frequencies,” Thuli said. “We can alert you if you’ve lost comms with who you were talking to and find your tail number on the next [frequency].”

Airhart’s initial market is the experimental, light sport and newly expanded Part 22 MOSAIC categories. Given how closely the company has worked with the consensus standards bodies shaping that regulatory wave, this was a deliberate choice. The full platform, including all display and computer units, autopilot servos and installation, is priced at $49,900. The desktop trainer is a $5,000 add-on.

“That’s it,” Thuli said. “That’s everything installed.”

FLYING got its closest look at the system installed in a Sling High Wing owned by Linda Sollars, who flew the airplane from California to Oshkosh for the show. The interface’s resemblance to consumer touchscreen products is intentional. 

“That’s the product of really a lot of intentional UI design,” Thuli said. “The focus at Airhart was on developing something that both experienced pilots and non-pilots alike can recognize as familiar but, at the same time, it’s also a breath of fresh air.”

Rather than displaying everything at once, the layout surfaces what’s relevant to the current phase of flight with a primary flight display on the left and multifunction information, including power, vertical speed, and altitude, on the right. Autopilot settings appear as small tabs that expand only when needed, giving the pilot a way to cross-check exactly what the system is set to do before engaging it.

Perhaps the clearest expression of that philosophy is the autopilot itself, which Airhart reduced to a single button. By default, it steers the aircraft along the loaded flight plan. Heading, altitude, vertical speed, and airspeed constraints layer on top as the pilot adjusts them, and a dedicated level button overrides everything instantly if a pilot becomes disoriented or uncomfortable, displaying exactly what wing-level attitude, heading, and altitude it’s rolling out to. 

“That just gives you trust and transparency into the system,” Thuli said. “When you hit that button, you know what’s going to happen, and you’re not left wondering.”

Automatic lights and automatic flaps extend that same context awareness into the sidebar, where the system can factor in real-time density altitude to recommend an optimal flap setting during approach, while still leaving the pilot free to fly it manually. By design, only two physical buttons remain in the cockpit—master power and push-to-start. 

“It’s as simple as it can get,” Thuli said.

Airhart enters the back half of 2026 with two Airhart-equipped aircraft flying. United Airlines Ventures invested in the company earlier this year as it began its first customer installations. For a company whose stated goal is dismantling the barriers between curious would-be pilots and the airplane, the reaction on the show floor suggested it’s making a real first impression. 

Click here to learn more about Airhart Aeronautics.