Honeywell’s Surface Alert System Progresses Towards Commercial Rollout

Honeywell has come one step closer to helping prevent runway incursions, with its SURF-A surface alert system now entering its final phase of testing. The tech sounds an audible alarm, bluntly “traffic on runway,” 30 seconds and 15 seconds before a potential collision could occur.

Runway incursions have become one of the FAA’s biggest headaches, with 1,664 reported in 2024, seven of them involving two aircraft on a collision course. In these situations, every second makes a difference: "It sounds like such a small amount of time, but things happen so rapidly, and 15 to 30 seconds is actually a very, very large margin when you're moving at the speeds that we're moving in an aircraft like this,” explained Honeywell test pilot Doug Rybczynski.

The company is flying its Boeing 757 testbed in the fall with certification loads installed, beginning the last round of system performance and human-factors evaluations. Honeywell hopes to earn a supplemental type certificate in the first half of 2026, allowing airlines to install the technology later that year. The project, which began back in 2020, is pitched as the first commercial-scale solution targeting the reduction of cockpit-level blind spots during takeoff and landing.

A recent demonstration of the technology turned heads. Honeywell put a Gulfstream on the runway in Topeka as the 757 approached. The SURF-A system used ADS-B Out position data to give both alerts, and the pilot executed a clean go-around. The scenario was designed to mirror a 2023 near-collision at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, when a FedEx 767 on final approach narrowly missed a Southwest 737 cleared onto the same runway. Honeywell argues its system would have given the FedEx crew an extra 28 seconds of notice to react deliberately.

Still, Honeywell executives know that SURF-A is not a cure-all. "Pilots have a shared destiny on the aircraft. The pilot can be doing everything correct, but on a path to disaster,” said Honeywell technical fellow Thea Feyereisen.

FMI: www.honeywell.com