Collins Aerospace

You will hardly find an aircraft with “Collins” written on it – and yet the company is inside almost every airliner you photograph from the fence. Collins Aerospace supplies the head-up displays in the Dreamliner cockpit, the A220’s avionics, landing gear systems, engine nacelles, seats and galley inserts. And when you check FlightAware in the evening to see which aircraft was just overhead, you are using a Collins product as well. This profile sorts out the tangled company history and shows you where you can actually find the supplier’s technology as a spotter.

One name, five company histories

Collins Aerospace is young – the company in its current form has only existed since 2018. Some of its building blocks, however, are older than aviation itself. To understand why a single supplier covers so much, from the radio to the galley, you have to keep apart the lines that converged here.

The line that gave the company its name begins in 1933 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. There, Arthur A. Collins founded the Collins Radio Company, which at first built shortwave and broadcast equipment. Its radios accompanied a Richard Byrd Antarctic expedition and later the crewed space programs Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. In 1973, Rockwell International took over the company, which had run into financial difficulties, and in 2001 the avionics division was taken public again as Rockwell Collins.

In parallel, a second block grew at United Technologies. Hamilton Sundstrand was formed in 1999 from Hamilton Standard and Sundstrand and built auxiliary power units, electrical systems, fire protection and even the life support for NASA space suits. In 2012, United Technologies added the Goodrich Corporation – once a tire maker from Akron that, after selling its tire business to Michelin, had increasingly focused on aviation and had become, among other things, one of the largest landing gear manufacturers. The group formed UTC Aerospace Systems from Hamilton Sundstrand and Goodrich.

Rockwell Collins made some big purchases of its own in this period: in 2013 the communications services provider ARINC, and in 2017 the cabin interiors supplier B/E Aerospace, which supplied seats, ovens, coffee makers, oxygen systems and cabin lighting. At the end of November 2018, United Technologies then completed the acquisition of Rockwell Collins and merged it with UTC Aerospace Systems. The new name: Collins Aerospace, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Part of RTX

In 2020, the consolidation went a step further. The aerospace businesses of United Technologies and the defense group Raytheon merged to form Raytheon Technologies, which renamed itself RTX in July 2023. Since then, the group has been divided into three businesses: the engine builder Pratt & Whitney, the Raytheon defense business and, of course, Collins Aerospace.

As a spotter, you’ll find this interesting because Collins and Pratt & Whitney complement each other on some aircraft. On the Airbus A220, for example, the geared turbofan engines come from Pratt & Whitney, the nacelles around them from the Goodrich line and the avionics from the Rockwell Collins tradition. An aircraft with several RTX building blocks hanging on it.

The portfolio is not entirely stable, though. In July 2023, RTX agreed with its French competitor Safran to sell the actuation and flight control business for US$1.8 billion. The Italian government initially blocked the deal using special powers because of the Italian subsidiary Microtecnica; in July 2025, the sale was finally completed. What used to be Collins actuators has run under Safran ever since.

In the cockpit: avionics and head-up displays

The core business of the Rockwell Collins line is the cockpit. Collins supplies screens, flight guidance systems, radio and navigation equipment for airliners, business aircraft and military aircraft. On the Boeing 787, Honeywell and Rockwell Collins share flight controls, flight guidance and other avionics systems. The Collins share includes the head-up displays: on the Dreamliner, a HUD glass panel for both pilots is standard from the factory.

A head-up display projects attitude, speed and landing aids onto a transparent panel directly in the pilots’ field of view. Collins markets this technology under the name HGS (Head-up Guidance System), sometimes combined with infrared cameras as an Enhanced Vision System. If you see a small, slanted glass panel above the yoke or sidestick in cockpit photos, it is usually exactly this kind of device.

On the A220, which Bombardier originally developed as the CSeries, the avionics came from Rockwell Collins. In business aviation, the Pro Line Fusion cockpit system is one of the best-known Collins brands; it is found in numerous business jets and turboprops. You regularly come across these types on the GA apron at large airports – even though you can only guess at the avionics when the cockpit door is open.

Landing gear, wheels, brakes and nacelles

The Goodrich line has made Collins one of the big names in landing systems. The company builds main, nose and wing landing gear and the associated systems: brakes, wheels, control electronics, extension and retraction mechanisms and nosewheel steering. Goodrich products are found on many airliners, including the Airbus A380. Which type carries which landing gear from which manufacturer cannot be said across the board, though – on the Dreamliner, for example, the landing gear comes from the competitor Safran, and on the A220 from Liebherr Aerospace.

The second big Goodrich building block is the engine nacelles, that is, the cowling including the thrust reverser around the engine itself. Goodrich had acquired the nacelle specialist Rohr in 1997. On the A220, the nacelles come from this line. For spotters, nacelles are one of the most important recognition features of all: their shape, their length and the serrations on the trailing edge often reveal the type and engine generation.

In the cabin: seats, galleys, oxygen

With B/E Aerospace, Collins took over one of the major cabin interiors suppliers. The range includes passenger seats for all classes, ovens, coffee makers and inserts for galleys, lavatories, oxygen masks and cabin lighting. The Interior Structures division in Leighton Buzzard in the UK, for example, produced galley modules for the Airbus A350. In 2024, Collins also announced it would invest more than £16 million in its plant in Kilkeel, Northern Ireland, where passenger seats are made.

The moving map on your seatback screen may also come from Collins: the Airshow brand is part of the portfolio. And the air you breathe on board is conditioned on many types by air conditioning systems from the Hamilton Sundstrand line – on the Dreamliner, for example, it supplies the air conditioning packs and power distribution. How the system works is explained in the article on cabin air.

For spotters, the cabin is not the main subject, but it is a good reason to look more closely on your next flight. Manufacturer plates on seats and galleys often reveal more about an aircraft than the livery.

Data: ARINC and FlightAware

Less visible, but central to flight operations, is the data business. ARINC was originally founded by airlines to organize communication between aircraft and the ground. Under Collins, the brand operates datalink networks through which cockpits and airline operations centers exchange messages, as well as IT services for airports.

The acquisition with the biggest spotter connection is FlightAware. The flight tracking service from Houston, founded in 2005, has belonged to Collins since November 2021 and continues to operate under its own name. FlightAware relies on a worldwide network of tens of thousands of ADS-B ground stations, many of them run by private individuals. If you set up a receiver yourself, you can feed your data in using the PiAware software – how to do that is covered in the article Installing and setting up PiAware.

Airport IT and the 2025 cyberattack

Part of the ARINC legacy is also software that runs at airports – such as the MUSE system, through which several airlines share check-in desks and boarding gates. How dependent operations are on it became clear in September 2025: a cyberattack on this Collins software disrupted passenger processing at several European airports, including Berlin Brandenburg, Brussels, Dublin and London Heathrow. Passengers were temporarily checked in by hand again, and there were delays and cancellations.

For spotters, this was a rare moment when the Collins name was suddenly in the news. A supplier that otherwise stays invisible had, for a few days, a visible influence on how much there was to see on the spotters’ hill.

Collins compared

Collins plays in a small league of large aerospace suppliers that share many programs. The most important competitor in the cockpit is Honeywell Aerospace – on the 787, the two even work side by side. For landing gear, brakes, nacelles and cabins, Safran is the big European counterpart, which since 2025 also owns the former Collins actuation business. In avionics and cabin electronics, Collins also competes with Thales, and in landing gear and air conditioning systems with Liebherr Aerospace.

Unlike engine makers such as GE Aerospace or Pratt & Whitney, whose products you recognize by the shape of the fans, Collins mostly stays invisible from the outside. That is exactly what makes the company interesting: it is the part of aviation that disappears between the big names – and without which hardly any Airbus or Boeing would fly.

Conclusion

Collins Aerospace is the prime example of an aerospace company that passengers never consciously notice. Collins Radio, Goodrich, Hamilton Sundstrand, B/E Aerospace and ARINC have grown into a supplier that provides almost everything an airliner needs to fly and to serve its passengers, from the head-up display and the landing gear to the coffee maker in the galley.

For you as a spotter, a look behind the scenes is worthwhile because it explains why types look the way they do. And at the latest when you check FlightAware after a day of spotting to see which aircraft came into your frame, you have become a Collins customer yourself.