Sit Down With Success: Mark Spencer of Avilution

Huntsville has long been a key player in the development of the aerospace industry with a strong focus on innovation and cutting-edge technologies. At one time known as the “Watercress Capital of the World,” Huntsville and Madison County have evolved into a vibrant tech hub fondly known as the Rocket City, thanks in large part to the impact of Marshall Space Flight Center and the U.S. Army’s Aviation and Missile Command (AMCOM). 

Numerous aerospace and aerospace-related companies have grown from infancy in Madison County since the 1950s. The continuing evolution of the city’s aerospace sector is reflected in the name of one of these companies, Avilution, founded by Mark Spencer in 2010.

Avilution began in a corporate hangar in Jetplex Industrial Park, recently moving into a spacious new standalone facility at 115 Houston Goodson Way SW with a 6,000 square foot office and an attached 7,000 square foot hangar in October 2021. 

The cutting-edge Avilution facility presents itself as Spencer’s love letter to aviation, featuring details such as a restored KR-2 aircraft hanging from the ceiling and repurposed airplane components converted into furniture, including a conference table made from a glass-topped DC-9 engine cowling with moving fan blades and a table in the crew lounge made from engine cylinders. 

Spencer’s entrepreneurial skills became evident early on. A co-op position at Adtran led to his founding of Digium (now a subsidiary of Sangoma Technologies) in 1999 while still an undergraduate engineering student at Auburn University. 

“Like most college students, time was worth a lot less than money, so I built my own website and computer, which was not uncommon even then,” Spencer said. “Among other things, I needed a phone system – something very expensive at the time. As a cost saving measure, I decided to make my own phone system, and as a Linux geek decided I would make it available on the Internet for download, calling the product Asterisk.” 

With the help of others, Spencer realized the significance of the phone system he created a couple of years later. “It came out at a time when the technology was transitioning from being mostly hardware to mostly software and from older technology (time division multiplexing) to new (Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP).” 

Spencer’s interest in aviation began at a young age.

“Even as a kid,” he said, “I always enjoyed airplanes but thought it was something that wouldn’t ever be in my reach. Fortunately our CEO and VP of Sales at Digium helped give me perspective that flying a plane was something I could do.” 

Spencer went on to earn a pilot’s license, and when he learned to fly he observed striking similarities between the avionics and telecom industries, “so it seemed like a natural and fun field to go into.” 

In 2010, Spencer launched Avilution, LLC to create a number of Android apps for pilots, including QuickWeather and AviationMaps. Using a similar strategy as he did with Asterisk, Spencer then developed the eXtensible Flight System (XFS), a cross-platform avionics architecture. 

In addition to XFS, Spencer and his team created a unique product called the UnPanel, which provides avionics companies with the opportunity to replace the standard “one-size-fits-all” control panel with a specialized display screen focused on the type of visual flying their customers are doing.

“In the case of the UnPanel,” Spencer explained, “Avilution asked Zenith, a manufacturer of kit aircraft, to throw out everything they knew about avionics and from a clean sheet just describe what would be most important to their customers.” 

Avilution and Zenith worked together to determine the most crucial instruments for Zenith’s customers, such as angle of attack, altitude, available fuel, and so on. They made those instruments the focus at the top of an enormous 17-inch display similar to that of the Tesla Model S. 

This enabled them to replace the entire instrument panel with a single large, easy-to-read dynamic display with simple instruments focused on what mattered most to the needs of each customer, greatly improving their forward visibility in the process.

“In a sense,” Spencer said, “you can think of the UnPanel as a vendor (Skytron Avionics) who takes our software and installs it on their hardware and together we configure it to meet the needs of a customer.”