To Date, The Only Runway Safety Products To Achieve FAA
Milestone
Honeywell's SmartRunway and SmartLanding technologies,
developed to reduce runway accidents at crowded airports, have
received FAA Technical Standard Order (TSO) approval, the company
announced Wednesday. The approval will allow the company to
deliver its runway products to customers for aircraft installation.
Honeywell has the only runway safety products to be certified by
the FAA for production.
SmartRunway provides visual and aural alerts to pilots about
runway and taxi locations and SmartLanding informs pilots of
unstable approaches and long landings, when an aircraft lands too
far down the runway to safely stop.
"SmartRunway and SmartLanding address the $1 billion cost of
runway excursions and incursions to the commercial flight
industry," said TK Kallenbach, Honeywell Vice President of Product
Management. "This new software provides added situational awareness
at increasingly crowded airports while reinforcing standard
operating procedures."
SmartRunway helps break the chain of events that can lead to a
runway incursion by providing timely advisories -- aural and/or
visual -- to the flight crew about aircraft position compared to
runway locations in the database. SmartRunway is the next
generation of Honeywell's Runway Awareness and Advisory System
(RAAS), the first runway advisory system introduced in 2004, and
installed on more than 200 air transport and 1,470 business
aircraft, with another 800 airline systems on order. SmartRunway
offers two additional advisories over RAAS, as well as visual
advisories. Boeing recently announced they are offering SmartRunway
as an option on the 747-8 and 777 aircraft, and will offer it on
the 737 in early 2010.
B747-8
SmartLanding addresses the chain of events that can lead to a
runway excursion event by notifying pilots through aural and/or
visual alerts if the aircraft has not met established safety
criteria on approach, to help prevent the aircraft from landing too
hard or exiting the runway from the end or the sides. The Flight
Safety Foundation reports that in the past 14 years, there has been
an average of almost 30 runway excursion accidents per year for
commercial aircraft.
"The systems support both 'quiet' cockpit and 'heads-up'
initiatives while complementing electronic flight bag technology by
providing safety information to pilots when runway safety is at
risk," said Kallenbach. "SmartRunway and SmartLanding are the
latest software enhancements to our EGPWS, which is found on more
than 30,000 business and air transport aircraft."
The systems require just one hour of aircraft downtime for
installation and minimal pilot training, and are software upgrades
to Honeywell's Mark V and Mark VII Enhanced Ground Proximity
Warning System (EGPWS), the leading Controlled Flight Into Terrain
(CFIT) Warning Systems. Honeywell's EGPWS contains a global
terrain, obstacle and runway database and more than 600 million
hours of global flight validation.