WASHINGTON — The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommends new technology in airplane cockpits to give pilots quicker notice of an impending collision on runways.
The agency released findings this week of its investigation of a January 2023 runway incursion at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) in New York City, where an American Airlines jet crossed a runway in front of a Delta Airlines flight that had been cleared for takeoff.
“We recommended that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) collaborate with aircraft and avionics manufacturers and software designers to develop the technology for a flight deck system that would provide visual and aural alerts to flight crews of traffic on a runway or taxiway and traffic on approach to land,” the NTSB report states.
In the JFK incident, an air traffic controller received an alert of the runway conflict and canceled the takeoff clearance for the Delta jet, avoiding a collision.
Thea Feyereisen, a senior technical fellow with Honeywell Aerospace Technologies, estimates a cockpit warning system could have alerted the pilots involved in the JFK incident 12 seconds sooner than air traffic control.
“It can help get the message to the pilot sooner,” Feyerisen said. “It’s the difference between life and death. The sooner we can give the pilot an alert that there’s a potential collision, the more time the pilot has to process that information.”
Feyerisen and a team from Honeywell came to Seattle last week to demonstrate their Surf-A system that provides visual and audible warnings when there is a potential collision or when a pilot is lined up to take off or land on a taxiway.
“We’re seeing trends of near misses getting nearer and nearer where it’s mere seconds from a collision. It’s the same amount of tarmac out there, but the operational density is increasing. We’re trying to fit more and more aircraft on a limited amount of concrete,” she said.
The NTSB has been warning about the dangers of runway incursions for years.
“Our safety system is showing clear signs of strain that we cannot ignore,” NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said at a November 2023 hearing on the issue. “It only takes one missed warning to become a tragedy. One incorrect response to destroy public confidence in the system that has been established over decades.”
KOMO News went along for a demonstration flight on Honeywell’s 757 test plane that demonstrated the Surf-A system at the Yakima airport.
The team used a Falcon 900 jet to recreate the JFK runway incursion scenario. As pilot Joe Duval, the director of flight test operations at Honeywell, accelerated the 757 down the runway, the Surf-A system alerted him of the intruding aircraft.
“That third set of eyes almost knows better than you do,” Duval said. “That something is going to cross that path, and if it’s dark or the weather is bad, you may not see that visually.”
Honeywell is currently demonstrating the Surf-A (Surface Alert) and an enhanced Surf-IA system (Surface Indication and Alert) systems to airlines and plane manufacturers across the country. The company hopes to achieve FAA certification sometime in the next 18 months.
If approved, Honeywell says the system can be delivered in new aircraft as well as retrofitted into existing fleets.