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.

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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.

FMI: www.honeywell.com