by DALLAS (AP) – As a Delta Air Lines jet began roaring down a runway, an air traffic controller at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport suddenly blurted out, then ordered the pilots to stop. add to his take off roll.
The controller saw an American Airlines plane mistakenly crossing the same runway, into the path of an accelerating Delta jet. JFK is one of 35 US airports equipped to track planes and ground vehicles. The system alerted the airport’s control tower to the danger, which could have saved lives last year.
The National Transportation Safety Board and many independent experts say pilots should receive warnings without waiting precious seconds to hear from controllers. Just last week, the NTSB recommended that the Federal Aviation Administration work with manufacturers to develop technology to notify pilots directly.
Honeywell International, a conglomerate with a large aerospace business, has been working on such an early warning system for about 15 years and thinks it is close to a finished product. The company gave a demonstration during a test flight last week. As pilot Joe Duval directed a Boeing 757 for a runway in Tyler, Texas, a warning appeared on his display and he heard in the cockpit: “Traffic on runway!”
The system had detected a business jet just visible as a speck on the runway about a mile away – ground the Boeing would cover in seconds.
Duval tilted the plane’s nose up and pushed the throttle forward into a G-force-inducing contraction, safely away from the Dassault Falcon 900 below.
Honeywell officials claim their technology would have alerted Delta pilots of the January 2023 near miss at JFK 13 seconds before the air traffic controller screamed the expletive and told them to abort takeoff. Eliminating the need for a controller to give the warning from ground systems could be critical.
“Those are microseconds, but they’re enough to make a difference,” said Michael McCormick, a former FAA official who now teaches air traffic management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. “The next step is to provide alerts directly to the hole. This puts the instrument in the hands of the pilot who is in control of the aircraft. This technology is a game changer.”
Honeywell plans to build the cockpit warning system on top of technology that is already widely used and warns pilots if they fly too low.
Incidents like the one at JFK are called runway incursions – a plane or ground vehicle is on a runway when it shouldn’t be. Some incursions are caused by pilots entering a runway without clearance from air traffic controllers. In other cases, there is not enough space between planes that are landing or taking off, which may be subject to pilots or controllers.
The number of collisions fell during the coronavirus pandemic and has not returned to recent peaks of more than 2,000 incidents recorded in 2016 and 2017. However, the most serious – where a collision was narrowly avoided or it had “significant potential”. in the event of an accident – they have been rising since 2017. There were 23 in the United States last year, up from 16 in 2022, according to FAA statistics.
Reducing intrusions has always been a priority for the FAA “because the greatest risk is in the aviation system,” said McCormick, the former FAA official.
The worst accident in aviation history occurred in 1977 on the Spanish island of Tenerife, when a KLM 747 began its take-off roll while a Pan Am 747 was still on the runway; 583 people died when the planes collided in thick fog.
Earlier this year, a Japan Airlines jet landing in Tokyo collided with a Japanese coast guard plane preparing to take off. Five crew members on the coast guard plane died, but all 379 people on board the airliner escaped before it was destroyed by fire.
The FAA has paid for airport improvements designed to reduce intrusions, such as reconfiguring confusing taxis. He also paid for the technology to alert people in the control tower when a plane lands on a taxiway instead of a runway.
That kind of landing error almost happened in 2017 in San Francisco, when an Air Canada jet pulled up at the last second to avoid crashing into four jets on the taxiway carrying about 1,000 passengers between them .
The FAA is also implementing more simulators for controllers to practice directing traffic during periods of low visibility. The NTSB recommended last week that the FAA requires annual refresher training. The recommendation came after the NTSB determined last year that the controller that caused a near-catastrophic crash between a FedEx plane and a Southwest Airlines jet during heavy fog in Austin, Texas, had not received training for low-visibility conditions for two years on the least.
The NTSB’s examination of the February 2023 shutdown in Austin renewed attention to the technology to provide cockpit warnings of potential intrusions and included a brief reference to the system being developed by Honeywell. The system, which Honeywell calls “Surf-A” for surface alert, has not been certified by the FAA, but the company thinks certification could happen in the next 18 months.
The FAA’s best technology against runway incursions is a system called ASDE-X that allows controllers to track planes and vehicles on the ground. But it’s expensive, so only 35 of the 520 US airports have a control tower.
“Some people thought ASDE-X was the solution,” said former NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt. “The problem is, there are a lot more than 35 air carrier airports. A product (that warns pilots in the dot) goes to every airport the plane goes to.”
Honeywell, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, began working on a cockpit warning system around 2008 and tried to convince airlines to support the idea, but says it found no takers. The company put the project on hold when the pandemic devastated aviation in 2020.
Then, as air travel recovered early last year, there were a series of high-profile close calls between planes at major US airports, including those at JFK and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
“Traffic was rising. You were throwing more of the near misses,” said Thea Feyereisen, part of the Honeywell team working on the system. The time was right to revive the warning system.
“Before, when we would talk to airlines, they weren’t interested. Last year, we talk to the airlines again, and now they are interested,” she said.
However, Honeywell has not launched a customer, and company officials would not say how much it would cost to outfit planes.
Feyereisen was asked if the system would prevent the close calls in New York and Austin.
“What our lawyers tell us (is) that the risk of a runway incursion is reduced. We provide more time for the pilot to decide” whether, for example, to abort a landing and fly around the airport instead, she said. “Still, the pilot has to make a decision.”
