Avoiding airplane collisions at airports could come down to alerts

ABOARD A HONEYWELL TEST PLANE — Aerospace giant Honeywell is building new 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 some 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 same runway where Vining was about to touch down at the Kansas airport.

“Traffic on runway!” called out the automated alert in the cockpit of Honeywell’s test plane: a 43-year-old Boeing 757, as Vining pulled up, aborted his landing and flew around the airport safely.

A host of serious close calls in recent years has raised concerns about how to better avoid them in ever-more congested airports. The National Transportation Safety Board and other safety experts have urged more advanced cockpit alerts like the ones Honeywell is testing.

Runway incursions, when a plane, person or vehicle is on the runway when they shouldn’t be, averaged 4.5 a day last year. The Federal Aviation Administration categorizes them by severity, where the top and rarest two are: “a serious incident in which a collision was narrowly avoided” followed by “an incident in which separation decreases and there is a significant potential for collision may result in a time-critical corrective/evasive response to avoid a collision.”

Serious runway incursions at U.S. airports peaked at 22 in 2023, the most in at least a decade. The FAA has added new lighting and other safety technology at airports around the country to try to get to its goal of zero close calls.

“He’s very good at being a bad pilot,” Thea Feyereisen, a distinguished technical fellow for Honeywell Aerospace Technologies, said of Vining. Her unit develops new cockpit features for aviators, and she said she expects the new suite to win regulator certification next year.

“Seconds count when you’re operating near the runway, and the sooner you can let the pilots know of a potential serious situation, the better,” Feyereisen said.

The Honeywell test plane wasn’t configured like a regular 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 in 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, a company spokesman told CNBC.

Vining performed a simulation of another incident from 2023, when an American Airlines 777 bound for London crossed a runway where a Delta Air Lines 737 was taking off instead of holding short of the runway as an air traffic controller instructed. The Delta pilot in that situation aborted takeoff and both planes landed safely at their destinations.

Honeywell said its SURF-A alerts could have given the pilots 10 additional seconds of reaction time with a potential collision notice. The new program Honeywell is testing uses Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast, or ADS-B data, a GPS for an airplane.

“It’s usually a very good working environment between pilots, air traffic control, airport management,” Vining said. “We get it done safely, efficiently and smoothly. But you could also see just the slightest interruption, a little variation, and things can go wrong very quickly.”

The aerospace giant already offers another suite of alerts that tells pilots if they’re about to make a mistake like landing or taking off on a taxiway instead of a runway, for example, with visual alerts on a screen as well as aural warnings — “Caution! Taxiway!” The so-called Smart X package also alerts pilots if flaps are not set correctly, if the runway is too short, or if they are coming in too high or too fast, among other situations.

“As aircraft get closer to the airports where there are other airplanes that are also flying low to the ground, attempting to land, that’s 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 more than 3,000 planes operated by 20 airlines, but that’s still limited adoption with hundreds of carriers operating worldwide.

“Since we’ve implemented the software, I can’t…