BIRDS EYE VIEW &
AIRCRAFT SITUATIONAL AWARENESS
One of the earliest pioneers in aircraft video camera systems was Joe Brunner, who founded Aerial View Systems in 1987. In the beginning it appeared the simplest way to install a video camera on the aircraft would be to stay in the pressurized areas of the aircraft and not face the problem of penetrating the pressure bulkheads. In addition, external installations would call for airframe modifications that would complicate the obtaining of an STC. As a result his first two aircraft video camera systems were designed to be installed inside the pressurized area.
Brunner has been associated with aviation essentially his entire life. His father was a flight engineer with American Airlines for 30 years and had been flying on aircraft from the Douglas DC-6 to the Boeing 747. Brunner learned to fly while attending Loyola University in Los Angeles. When he graduated, he received an ROTC Commission and subsequently served six years in the United States Air Force. He became a captain and flew F4 Phantom aircraft. After his time in the Air Force was up, he joined Global Navigation and became a manager of corporate and general aviation sales. After five years, Brunner joined Dassault Falcon Jet as their western regional sales manager. He enjoyed that job very much but eventually made the decision to go into business for himself.
Brunner became really interested in video camera systems on aircraft when American Airlines, for a time, had installed a video camera in the cockpit that allowed passengers to see a portion of the terrain ahead of the aircraft. On these aircraft, using a wide angle lens, only 1/3 of the picture was outside of the aircraft and the rest was in the cockpit. The outside picture was very bright and washed out and the portion of the picture that was inside the cockpit was very dark. Even though the overall picture was rather poor, Brunner noticed that the passengers were extremely interested in the in flight video pictures.
Due to this interest, Brunner developed a high quality video camera system for both corporate and general aviation aircraft. As a result, in 1985 he left Dassault Falcon Jet and founded his own company. He initially selected the name AirVision but subsequently found that AirVision was a company name that had already been taken. As a result, he changed the name to Aerial View Systems (AVS), and has operated under that name ever since.
