ABOARD A HONEYWELL TEST PLANE — Aerospace giant Honeywell is constructing recent cockpit alerts that developers say will give airline pilots more precious time to react to hazards at airports.
Honeywell senior test pilot Capt. Kirk Vining late last month put the alerts — called Surface Alert, or SURF-A — to the test by recreating a few of the most serious near disasters at airports in recent aviation history.
Moments before landing at Topeka Regional Airport, a Gulfstream G550 business jet was stopped on the identical runway where Vining was about to the touch down on the Kansas airport.
“Traffic on runway!” called out the automated alert within the cockpit of Honeywell’s test plane: a 43-year-old Boeing 757, as Vining pulled up, aborted his landing and flew across the airport safely.
Honeywell’s Boeing 757 test plane on the bottom in Topeka, Kansas.
Erin Black/CNBC
A bunch of significant close calls in recent times has raised concerns about tips on how to higher avoid them in ever-more congested airports. The National Transportation Safety Board and other safety experts have urged more advanced cockpit alerts just like the ones Honeywell is testing.
Runway incursions, when a plane, person or vehicle is on the runway after they should not be, averaged 4.5 a day last 12 months. The Federal Aviation Administration categorizes them by severity, where the highest and rarest two are: “a serious incident by which a collision was narrowly avoided” followed by “an incident by which separation decreases and there’s a major potential for collision may end in a time-critical corrective/evasive response to avoid a collision.”
Serious runway incursions at U.S. airports peaked at 22 in 2023, probably the most in no less than a decade. The FAA has added recent lighting and other safety technology at airports across the country to attempt to get to its goal of zero close calls.
‘Good at being a nasty pilot’
“He’s excellent at being a nasty pilot,” Thea Feyereisen, a distinguished technical fellow for Honeywell Aerospace Technologies, said of Vining. Her unit develops recent cockpit features for aviators, and he or she said she expects the brand new suite to win regulator certification next 12 months.
“Seconds count whenever you’re operating near the runway, and the earlier you’ll be able to let the pilots know of a possible serious situation, the higher,” Feyereisen said.
The Honeywell test plane wasn’t configured like a daily passenger jet, and there weren’t any paying customers on board. It had a set of roomy seats toward the front of the plane, but within the back, Honeywell flight engineers were positioned at consoles, monitoring flight data and the alerts in real time. Earlier that day, Honeywell demonstrated the technology on a flight with Department of Transportation, FAA and NTSB officials on board, an organization spokesman told CNBC.
Vining performed a simulation of one other incident from 2023, when an American Airlines 777 sure for London crossed a runway where a Delta Air Lines 737 was taking off as an alternative of holding wanting the runway as an air traffic controller instructed. The Delta pilot in that situation aborted takeoff and each planes landed safely at their destinations.
Consoles aboard Honeywell’s test plane, a Boeing 757.
Magdalena Petrova/CNBC
Honeywell said its SURF-A alerts could have given the pilots 10 additional seconds of response time with a possible collision notice. The brand new program Honeywell is testing uses Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast, or ADS-B data, a GPS for an airplane.
“It’s always a excellent working environment between pilots, air traffic control, airport management,” Vining said. “We get it done safely, efficiently and easily. But you would also see just the slightest interruption, a bit variation, and things can go improper in a short time.”
The aerospace giant already offers one other suite of alerts that tells pilots in the event that they’re about to make a mistake like landing or taking off on a taxiway as an alternative of a runway, for instance, with visual alerts on a screen in addition to aural warnings — “Caution! Taxiway!” The so-called Smart X package also alerts pilots if flaps will not be set appropriately, if the runway is simply too short, or in the event that they are coming in too high or too fast, amongst other situations.
“As aircraft catch up with to the airports where there are other airplanes which can be also flying low to the bottom, attempting to land, that is probably the most dangerous spot to have a collision occur,” said Jeff Guzzetti, a retired air safety investigator with the NTSB and the FAA.
Those alerts have been on Alaska Airlines planes for years and, more recently, Southwest Airlines has added them. Honeywell said the alerts are currently flying on greater than 3,000 planes operated by 20 airlines, but that is still limited adoption with a whole bunch of carriers operating worldwide.
“Since we have implemented the software, I am unable to consider an instance where we have had a runway incursion,” said Dave Hunt, Southwest’s vice chairman of safety and security and a 737 pilot.
American Airlines was also training its pilots on those alerts within the second quarter of the 12 months, in keeping with a lesson plan that was seen by CNBC. Last month, American received its first aircraft with the runway awareness and other alerts on board, a spokeswoman said, adding that its Boeing 737 pilots have now been trained on the tools.
The alerts aren’t required by regulators, however the FAA said it’s “reviewing recommendations” from the Runway Safety Alerting Subgroup “to find out next steps,” referring to a bunch of airline, aerospace, pilot union, government and industry officials that last 12 months really useful recent planes include more advanced cockpit alerts in case of situational awareness issues at airports.
“The alerts occur further away from the runway in order that if there’s an aircraft on the runway, you are not having to make that call very low to the bottom,” said Jon Sites, director of flight operations safety at Alaska Airlines.
The Swiss cheese model
Honeywell’s test plane during an illustration of recent anti-collision warning technology.
Leslie Josephs/CNBC
America is the busiest aviation market on the planet, with 44,000 flights, carrying 3 million travelers a day. Serious aviation accidents are rare, and fatal crashes are rarer still.
But a virtually 16-year streak with no fatal incident was broken on Jan. 29 when an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided into an American Airlines regional jet that was moments away from landing at Washington Reagan National Airport, killing the 67 people aboard the 2 aircraft and raising concerns about congested U.S. airspace to a fever pitch.
The aviation industry relies on a so-called Swiss cheese safety model, where each slice provides protection but comes with holes which can be ideally covered when safety measures are stacked on top of each other.
“Aviation is built on layers of safety upon layers,” said Sites at Alaska Airlines.
Honeywell’s demonstration flight last month from Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport in Kansas City, Missouri, recreated an actual incident that took place on a foggy morning in February 2023 in Austin, Texas, when a FedEx Boeing 767 plane aborted landing seconds before touching down on the identical runway from which an air traffic controller cleared a Southwest 737 to take off.
The FedEx pilot had seen the outline of the Southwest plane through the fog and pulled up and later landed safely. Each flights continued to their destinations safely, however the two aircraft had gotten as close as 150 feet apart, lower than the length of the FedEx 767, in keeping with federal safety investigators.
Feyereisen said Honeywell’s technology could have provided the FedEx pilots within the 2023 Austin incident 28 seconds of advanced notice of traffic on the runway, after they only had a number of moments to react, in keeping with a report from the NTSB.
Not yet required
Engineers collect data aboard a Honeywell test plane.
Magdalena Petrova/CNBC
Feyereisen said the brand new technology may very well be retrofitted on older aircraft and is offered for brand spanking new jets.
“Typically, the software costs tens of 1000’s of dollars [per plane], but not a whole bunch of 1000’s of dollars,” Feyereisen said. “So in the event you’re taking a look at [a] $150 million aircraft … it’s lower than a half a penny per passenger cost to the operation.”
Southwest this 12 months added the software to its fleet of about 800 Boeing 737s. It cost between $20 million and $30 million to outfit the planes, Hunt said.
“It’s cheaper than an accident,” he said.
On Feb. 25, a Southwest plane aborted its arrival after it was cleared to land at Chicago Midway International Airport when a Bombardier Challenger 350 business jet advanced onto its runway, with the Southwest jet passing lower than 200 feet between the aircraft, before safely landing after a go-around, in keeping with the NTSB.
Such close calls “are very, very rare, but obviously they’re something which can be concerning and that we might attempt to mitigate as much as possible,” said Hunt. The Honeywell software is “very effective at ensuring our pilots are aware of where they’re on the airport” and “does a very good job of stopping inadvertent runway incursions while taxiing,” he added.
Limitations
A Honeywell test pilot performs a go-around due to traffic on the runway at Topeka Regional Airport in Kansas as a part of an illustration.
Erin Black/CNBC
When developing the warnings, Feyereisen said it’s key to not overwhelm pilots with an excessive amount of information, referred to as “nuisance alerts,” which could find yourself being a distraction from critical safety tasks reasonably than a help.
“If you happen to’re blasting alerts through a cockpit speaker at low altitudes during a critical phase of flight, corresponding to approach to landing or takeoff, where pilots’ attention must be fully focused … you create too many distractions,” Southwest’s Hunt said.
There are also limitations to the prevailing alerts and the brand new programs Honeywell is testing. To avoid in-air collisions, business aircraft are required to have what’s called the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System, or TCAS, which helps them see traffic around them in displays within the cockpit. But that system is usually used for altitudes of no less than 1,000 feet.
That will not have necessarily helped the pilots on the American Airlines plane that was below 400 feet within the fatal collision with the Black Hawk helicopter in January in Washington, D.C.
“We’re exploring alternatives to shut that gap where you form of can merge TCAS and ADS-B-type information together,” Feyereisen said.
Sites, the security director at Alaska, said the D.C. crash was “an enormous, unexpected event within the industry, however it’s just, I feel, our track record through the last 50 years shows that this can be a very, very rare event.”
“That is why we proceed as an industry to try to search out even higher technology on the market and enhancements to the present technology to maintain this from ever happening and take the probability all the way down to as low a level as possible,” he said. “I do not know if in any aviation system you will ever get to zero, but I mean, we’ll attempt to get as near zero probability as we will.”
