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 an expletive and then ordered the pilots to halt their takeoff roll.
The controller saw an American Airlines plane accidentally cross the same runway, into the path of the accelerating Delta plane. JFK is one of only 35 U.S. airports with the equipment to track aircraft and vehicles on the ground. The system alerted the airport control tower to the danger, potentially saving lives last year.
The National Transportation Safety Board and many independent experts say pilots should get warnings without waiting precious seconds for word from controllers. Just last week, the NTSB recommended that the Federal Aviation Administration work with manufacturers to develop technology that could directly alert pilots.
Honeywell International, a conglomerate with a major aerospace business, has been working on such an early warning system for about 15 years and believes it is close to a finished product. The company gave a demonstration during a test flight last week. As pilot Joe Duval aimed a Boeing 757 at a runway in Tyler, Texas, a warning appeared on his display and the cockpit sounded: “Traffic on the runway!”
The system had detected a corporate jet appearing as a speck on the runway just a mile away; a ground that the Boeing would cover in a matter of seconds.
Duval tilted the plane’s nose upward and pushed the throttle forward in a G-force-inducing climb, safely away from the Dassault Falcon 900 below.
Honeywell officials claim their technology would have alerted Delta pilots who had a near miss at JFK in January 2023, 13 seconds before the air traffic controller shouted the expletive and told them to abort their takeoff. Simply eliminating the need for a controller to relay the alert to systems on the ground can 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. “Directly transmitting warnings to the cockpit is the next step. This puts the instrument in the hands of the pilot who actually has control of the aircraft. This technology is a game changer.”
Honeywell plans to combine the cockpit warning system with technology that is already widely used and warns pilots if they fly too low.
Incidents like the one at JFK are called runway incursions: an aircraft or ground vehicle is on a runway when it shouldn’t be. Some incursions are caused by pilots entering a runway without permission from air traffic controllers. In other cases, there is not enough space between planes landing or taking off, which may be the fault of pilots or controllers.
The number of raids fell during the coronavirus pandemic and has not returned to the recent peaks of over 2,000 incidents recorded in both 2016 and 2017. However, the most serious are – where a collision was narrowly avoided or there was a “significant potential”. before a crash – have increased since 2017. There were 23 in the United States last year, up from 16 in 2022, according to FAA statistics.
Reducing the number of raids has always been a priority for the FAA “because that’s where the greatest risk lies 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 took off while a Pan Am 747 was still on the runway; 583 people were killed when the planes collided in dense fog.
Earlier this year, a Japan Airlines plane landing in Tokyo collided with a Japanese Coast Guard plane that was preparing to take off. Five crew members of the Coast Guard plane were killed, but all 379 people on board the plane escaped before it was destroyed by fire.
The FAA has paid for airport improvements intended to reduce the number of incursions, such as reconfiguring confusing taxiways. It has also paid for technology to alert people in the control tower when a plane is lining up to land on a taxiway instead of a runway.
That kind of landing error almost happened in San Francisco in 2017, when an Air Canada plane stopped at the last second to avoid crashing into four planes on the taxiway carrying about 1,000 passengers between them.
The FAA is also introducing more simulators that will allow controllers to practice directing traffic during low visibility conditions. The NTSB last week recommended that the FAA require annual refresher courses. The suggestion came after the NTSB determined that a controller who nearly caused a catastrophic crash between a FedEx plane and a Southwest Airlines jet last year during heavy fog in Austin, Texas, has been going on for at least two years. had not trained for years for conditions with poor visibility.
The NTSB’s investigation of the February 2023 close call in Austin also renewed attention on technology to provide cockpit warnings of possible incursions and included a brief reference to the system Honeywell is developing. The FAA has not certified the system, which Honeywell calls “Surf-A” for surface alerts, but the company believes 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 aircraft and vehicles on the ground. But it’s expensive, so it’s only at 35 of the 520 U.S. airports with a control tower.
“Some people thought ASDE-X was the solution,” said former NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt. “The problem is that there are far more than 35 airports for airlines. A product (that alerts pilots in the cockpit) 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 the company says it has found no takers. The company suspended the project when the pandemic devastated aviation in 2020.
As air travel recovered early last year, there were a series of high-profile close calls between planes at major U.S. airports, including those at JFK and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
“The traffic picked up. You had more near misses,” says Thea Feyereisen, part of the Honeywell team that worked on the system. The timing was right to revive the warning system.
“Previously when we talked to airlines, they weren’t interested. Last year we started talking to the airlines again, and now they are interested,” she said.
Still, Honeywell doesn’t have a launch customer, and company officials won’t say how much it would cost to outfit an aircraft.
Feyereisen was asked if the system would have prevented the close calls in New York and Austin.
“What our lawyers are telling us to say (is) we are reducing the risk of a runway incursion. We’re giving the pilot more time to make a decision” on whether, for example, he should cancel a landing and fly around the airport instead, she said. “Still, the pilot has to make a decision.”