The Honeywell Anthem, the First New Cockpit Architecture in Twenty Years, and What a Cloud-Connected Flight Deck Means for the Pilots Who Fly It

The Honeywell Anthem is the first entirely new integrated avionics architecture from a major supplier in roughly twenty years, and the first production cockpit designed from the ground up to be cloud-connected. Announced at the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) conference in 2021, it is currently in active certification with both the FAA and EASA as of 2026. The launch platform is the Dassault Falcon 10X, Dassault’s flagship ultra-long-range business jet.

Why the Existing Architecture Needed to Change

Understanding Anthem requires understanding what it is replacing - and why that architecture, despite decades of proven reliability, has become a constraint.

When Garmin introduced the G1000 in 2002, it transformed aviation. The glass panel revolution pulled primary flight displays, navigation, engine monitoring, and moving maps onto integrated screens. It reduced single-pilot workload and improved situational awareness in instrument conditions across general aviation and business aviation alike.

But the G1000 changed what pilots saw. It did not change how the avionics system was built underneath.

The underlying architecture remained organized around line-replaceable units - discrete boxes communicating through defined protocols, specifically ARINC 429, which was standardized in 1977. ARINC 429 is extraordinarily reliable, proven across billions of flight hours, and still the dominant avionics data bus in transport-category aircraft. Its maximum data rate, however, is 100 kilobits per second - slower than a dial-up internet modem. For moving small structured packets between known internal systems, that is entirely adequate. For a cockpit designed to participate in a live external data ecosystem, it is not.

The EFB Split: A Kludge the Industry Has Lived With

The connected cockpit era arrived anyway - but it arrived around the certified architecture rather than inside it.

Electronic flight bags filled the gap. iPads running ForeFlight or Garmin Pilot pulled weather data, charts, and approach plates from the internet. They work remarkably well. But they created a structural split: certified avionics on the type certificate live in one world; the EFB lives in another. Bridging them requires Bluetooth adapters, data bridge hardware like Garmin Flight Stream, and manual waypoint entry from one device into the other.

The system functions. But it is a workaround, and everyone in the industry knows it. Anthem is designed to make that split disappear.

What Anthem Actually Changes: IP Networking Inside the Type Certificate

The hardware backbone of Anthem is avionics-grade Ethernet - Internet Protocol networking. Faster than ARINC 429 by orders of magnitude, more flexible in how data is routed between systems, and engineered for external data connections from the ground up, built into the type certificate rather than bolted onto the outside of it.

For pilots, the practical changes are significant:

Real-time weather flows directly into the navigation display via a live IP connection, not a satellite radio service with a processing delay.
Navigation database updates are managed over the air, the way a phone handles software updates, instead of requiring SD cards, proprietary software, or a laptop session.
Charts, airport information, performance data, and aircraft documentation live inside the certified avionics - not on a separate device brought from home.

Aircraft Health Monitoring: What the Maintenance Community Is Watching

Most of the pilot-facing discussion of Anthem focuses on the interface. The feature drawing the most attention from operators and maintenance organizations is different.

The data does not only flow inbound. An aircraft on the Anthem platform can push health data outbound - engine trend data, avionics self-test results, systems status - transmitted to a maintenance operation on the ground while the aircraft is still in flight.

The practical implication is predictive maintenance at a level not previously available in general or business aviation. Today, a maintenance team learns what is wrong with an aircraft when it lands and the crew reports a squawk, or during a scheduled inspection. On a connected platform, anomalous component behavior can be flagged before it becomes a write-up, a replacement part ordered, and a technician positioned before the aircraft touches down. Commercial airlines have had versions of this through ACARS systems for years. Anthem brings a more integrated version to business aviation.

For fleet operators where aircraft availability is a revenue question, this is a meaningful operational change.

The Interface: Five Touchscreens and Intent-Based Flight Management

The Anthem interface in full business jet configuration consists of five 24-inch diagonal touchscreen displays - high-brightness panels designed for direct sunlight readability, with gesture control: swipe, pinch, tap.

The human factors engineering tradeoff here has been debated in the industry for a decade. Touchscreens in turbulence are difficult. There is no physical detent, no tactile confirmation that a precise target was hit when the airplane is moving the pilot’s hand. Garmin documented this problem when introducing touchscreen navigators - pilots in rough conditions reverted to physical knobs whenever possible.

Honeywell’s response was to design around it. High-frequency inputs - the adjustments most likely to happen in turbulence, heading selections, altitude changes, autopilot mode changes - are assigned guarded interface areas with physical resistance. A turbulence mode enlarges touch targets. Gesture recognition filters small unintentional inputs from a bouncing hand. Whether that is fully equivalent to a dedicated physical control in the worst conditions is a question the flight test program is actively answering.

Addressing Mode Confusion: Intent-Based Flight Deck Management

The second interface question is one aviation has been working on for thirty years, and Anthem’s approach to it is worth examining carefully.

Mode confusion - a flight crew not understanding what mode the autopilot is in, the automation doing something correct but completely unexpected - appears repeatedly in the accident record going back to the 1990s. The NTSB, the Flight Safety Foundation, and every major aviation safety body has identified it as a systemic problem in glass cockpit operations. Results have ranged from altitude deviations to controlled flight into terrain.

Anthem’s design philosophy is called intent-based flight deck management. The pilot states a desired outcome - reach this fix at this altitude at this speed. The system manages execution. The display communicates what the airplane is currently doing, not which mode it has selected to accomplish that.

The distinction sounds subtle. But most pilots with glass cockpit experience have spent a moment reading a mode annunciator and mentally reconstructing what that mode actually means the airplane will do next. Anthem attempts to skip that translation step entirely.

Simulator results Honeywell has released look promising. Operational data, the kind accumulated on transatlantic legs at 2 a.m. after a full duty day, will accumulate over time. That data will be the real test.

The Cybersecurity Question

A connected avionics architecture has a security surface that an isolated one does not. In aviation, that is not an abstract concern.

The FAA has been developing avionics cybersecurity guidance for years. The core question is whether an external network connection can be used against safety-critical flight systems. Honeywell’s architecture separates the connected services network from the flight-critical systems network, with inbound data passing through certified security processing before it can influence anything safety-critical. The company has published documentation on its certified cybersecurity partitioning framework.

Whether that is sufficient will be answered through the full FAA and EASA certification review. Aviation certification is thorough; the testing these systems undergo before touching a revenue flight is extensive. But this is the first architecture of its kind to go through the full certification process. What the review reveals will be instructive not just for Anthem but for every connected cockpit that follows it.

Why Dassault Selected Anthem for the Falcon 10X

Dassault’s selection of Anthem as the avionics suite for the Falcon 10X carries weight in the industry because of Dassault’s engineering culture. They are not a company that installs unproven technology in a flagship aircraft to generate coverage. Their decisions on avionics architecture are long-cycle choices made around what they believe will define the category for a generation. When they selected Anthem over established alternatives, it was a statement about where they see business jet avionics heading.

The Falcon 10X’s fly-by-wire flight controls - technology derived directly from Dassault’s work on the Rafale fighter - add technical significance to the pairing. On an aircraft where both the flight control computers and the avionics suite are built on modern network architectures, the integration potential is qualitatively different. Flight controls and navigation can share situational data more directly than on a traditional architecture, creating a foundation for more sophisticated envelope protection, energy management, and precision approach capability. The full extent of what that enables is still being defined.

Where Anthem Stands Against Established Competitors

Anthem does not enter a vacant market. Garmin’s G5000 and G7000 integrated flight deck systems are mature, proven, and installed across a substantial share of new light-to-midsize business jet production. Collins Aerospace’s Pro Line Fusion has an established operational track record. Both platforms have standardized training programs, experienced type rating examiners, and years of line operations behind them.

For a flight department or charter operator making acquisition decisions, training standardization is a real cost. A mixed fleet with G7000 aircraft and Anthem aircraft means two parallel training programs, two sets of interface habits for pilots to manage, and two sets of proficiency requirements. That is not a minor consideration.

It is also how every technology transition in aviation has worked. When glass panels replaced analog instruments, mixed fleets existed for a decade. The operational community adapted, and the institutions built around older technology gradually gave way to those built around the new one.

Certification Status as of 2026

As of 2026, Anthem is in active certification with both the FAA and EASA. The Falcon 10X program is progressing through certification alongside it. Honeywell has not publicly committed to a specific entry-into-service date, and that caution is appropriate - certification schedules in aviation are elastic by nature. The hardware is flying in test aircraft. The certification program is active. This is a real system moving through a real regulatory process, not a concept.

The first generation of Falcon 10X pilots will be the first to build the operational data record that answers the open questions.

Why This Matters Beyond One Aircraft

Everything aviation is working toward over the next twenty years assumes connectivity. Electric aircraft optimizing energy management with real-time atmospheric data. Urban air mobility operating within traffic management ecosystems. Increased operational density in controlled airspace requiring continuous state-sharing between all aircraft. The connected flight deck is not a feature to add - it is infrastructure for what the airspace system is trying to become.

Anthem is the first serious attempt to build that infrastructure from the inside, within the type certificate, designed into the architecture rather than implemented on a tablet in the pilot’s lap. Whether this specific implementation succeeds - whether the cybersecurity partitioning satisfies regulators, whether the intent-based interface earns genuine acceptance in line operations, whether the philosophy behind it actually reduces the mode confusion problem that has cost lives for three decades - those questions are still being answered.

The question being asked, however, is the right one.

Key Takeaways

The Honeywell Anthem, announced at NBAA in 2021, is the first entirely new integrated avionics architecture from a major supplier in roughly twenty years, built on IP networking rather than the ARINC 429 standard dating to 1977.
Anthem eliminates the EFB split by integrating cloud connectivity, real-time weather, and over-the-air database updates directly into the certified avionics, inside the type certificate.
Its outbound health data capability enables predictive maintenance at a level not previously available in general or business aviation - comparable to what commercial airlines have had through ACARS, but more integrated.
Five 24-inch touchscreen displays and an intent-based flight deck management philosophy directly target the mode confusion problem identified repeatedly in the glass cockpit accident record.
The Dassault Falcon 10X is the launch platform; as of 2026, the system is in active FAA and EASA certification with no publicly committed entry-into-service date.
The connected flight deck architecture Anthem represents is not an isolated product decision - it is the foundational infrastructure for the higher-density, data-driven airspace system aviation is building toward.