Honeywell's air division is preparing to launch Surf-A, a surface warning system that will provide a “third pair of eyes” for aircraft pilots.
The company demonstrated the solution in June on a series of flights between Seattle and Yakima, Washington, in the United States, using its Boeing 757 testbed. If everything goes according to plan, the solution could be certified by the Federal Aviation istration of the United States (FAA), the North American agency that regulates air transport, and will be available for sale within 12 to 18 months.
Surf-A warns pilots in the aircraft about the danger of invasions, departures or other incidents that may occur on the runways. The software uses GPS and ADS-B data to monitor traffic and provides an auditory alert to the pilot when its algorithms determine that the plane is on a trajectory that could result in a collision within the next 30 seconds.
Pilots using the tool can hear four different alerts: “traffic on the home straight”, “traffic behind the aircraft”, “traffic on the runway” and “traffic crossing the runway”. In addition to auditory alerts, text messages also appear on the pilot's navigation display.
The solution builds on Honeywell's already certified runway warning and advisory system and SmartRunway/SmartLanding software, which uses the aircraft's GPS location combined with geographic data to provide onboard alerts when a pilot is at risk of overrunning the runway. or land on the wrong surface. These tools can also alert pilots when takeoff flaps are not adjusted, an approach is unstable or if a runway is too short, for example.
The next evolution of this Honeywell technology is Surf-AI (Airport Surface Situational Awareness with Cues and Alerts), which adds more sophisticated visual indicators to flight displays. Since 2018, the company has carried out a series of tests with these tools in collaboration with Airbus and Dassault.
While Surf-IA is intended for advanced tuning on new aircraft, the more basic Surf-A will be available within 12 to 18 months as an affordable and simple-to-install retrofit, Feyereisen explained. “Our desire is for this to not only be an option for future adaptation, but also for modernization, and to bring this capability to all types of aircraft.”
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