Charting the Future: Strategic Insights For Hercules Avionics Upgrade

Lynden Air Cargo is a Part 121 supplemental all-cargo airline headquartered in Anchorage, Alaska, providing airlift in challenging environments across Alaska and the world. The company operates a fleet of nine Lockheed L-382G aircraft, sometimes known as the L-100, which is the civil type-certificated version of the military C-130 cargo aircraft. With the previous avionics modernization program upgrade now more than 20 years old, it is a critical necessity to upgrade the fleet’s avionics again to continue providing cost effective and reliable aircraft to service our customers and the communities we serve.

But how do you know you are at the end of life for your current avionics system?

First, you will see a dramatic increase in repair costs, sometimes well over two to three times what the components cost when they were new. You will also see extended repair lead times, sometimes exceeding 12 months. This is compounded by shorter and shorter intervals between failures after repair, which drives higher spare component requirements.

At that point, new components are no longer available, only overhauled or repaired units. If the avionics package is well beyond its service life, you may find that some components are no longer procurable, regardless of cost. At that stage, you can buy as many spares as budget and availability allow and begin triaging the no longer procurable items by engineering in newer components. That approach is not cost-effective or reliable long term and the only real solution is a full avionics upgrade.

Lynden Air Cargo’s strategy was not just to recreate the past, but to build on it, modernize our capabilities and improve reliability. This upgrade will include a new digital autopilot reducing crew fatigue. The last of the steam gauges will be replaced moving to a full glass cockpit with a fully modern EICAS system that will vastly reduce crew workload.

Synthetic vision terrain overlay for enhanced safety to combat Alaska’s famous weather shifts, ADS-B In for FIS-B local weather information. HARP/CARP for our precision humanitarian aerial delivery operations. Completing the upgrade with modern Safety Voice long range digital communications and FANS 1/A for worldwide operations.

We also operate in some of the most demanding aircraft environmental conditions on the face of the earth, so we need avionics that can meet the types of conditions modern airliners will never see. Additionally, with worldwide operations our customers depend on our fleet reliability, so a maximum amount of redundancy has been engineered in, with the military mantra, “Two is one and one is none,” taken to heart.

We wanted a partner who met our requirements and who would see us as more than just another customer. Only one company was able to meet all of those objectives: Moog Avionics. They were willing to fly with us in Alaska to fully understand how we operate and what our needs are. Moog is performing the full-system design for the solution and obtaining an FAA Airworthiness Approval (STC) onto the platform.

This is a working partnership, with Lynden Air Cargo assigning a pilot, avionics technicians and our engineering staff to help develop the solution hand and hand with Moog engineers. We do not want to have a completely bespoke package that will be difficult and expensive to support a decade from now. Lynden Air Cargo, along with Moog Avionics, believe a version of this avionics package will be in high demand for C-130 operators around the world.

Any upgrade of this size will require third-party equipment and Lynden Air Cargo and Moog Avionics have been able to identify additional partnerships that synergize and just make sense for the program. Along with Moog’s Genesys Avionics Suite™ full glass cockpit solution composed of EFIS displays, autopilot, Nav/Comm radios and associated sensors, Anodyne Electronics Manufacturing (AEM) is providing the digital audio system, the P139-HD and KGB Aviation Solutions is providing its data acquisition units, the Skylog-DAU and its CVFDR, the Skylog-25, all of which meet our rigorous environmental requirements and require no proprietary software or equipment to maintain. A project of this scope isn’t for the faint of heart.

We were fortunate to acquire an additional aircraft for fleet expansion while we were planning this upgrade, so we did not have to pull an in-service aircraft offline for development. Instead, we are able to conduct development on an aircraft that is undergoing a bridging check to our operational specifications and fleet standardization.

The current timeline calls for flight testing in 3Q 2026 and STC approval in 1Q 2027, with the full fleet upgrade completed over the following three years during heavy checks.