DALLAS — As a Delta Airlines jet roared down the runway, an air traffic controller at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport suddenly started yelling expletives and ordered the pilot to stop the takeoff roll.
Air traffic controllers saw an American Airlines plane accidentally cross the same runway and into the path of the accelerating Delta flight. JFK is one of 35 U.S. airports equipped with devices that track planes and vehicles on the ground. The system alerted the tower to the danger last year, potentially saving lives.
The National Transportation Safety Board and many independent experts have said pilots should be warned without having to wait precious seconds for instructions from air traffic controllers. Just last week, the NTSB recommended that the Federal Aviation Administration work with manufacturers to develop technology that would alert pilots directly.
Aerospace conglomerate Honeywell International has been working on such an early-warning system for about 15 years and believes it is close to perfecting it. The company demonstrated it during a test flight last week: As pilot Joe Duvall pointed his Boeing 757 toward the runway in Tyler, Texas, a warning popped up on the display and an audible alarm sounded in the cockpit: “Traffic on runway!”
The system detected the business jet as a dot on the runway about a mile away, a distance the Boeing can cover in a few seconds.
Duval tilted the plane’s nose up and pushed the throttle forward, creating g-forces that helped it climb and move safely away from the Dassault Falcon 900 below.
Honeywell officials argue that its technology would have warned Delta Air Lines 13 seconds before air traffic controllers began yelling abuse at the pilot and ordering the plane to abort the takeoff after a near miss at John F. Kennedy International Airport in January 2023. Even just eliminating the need for air traffic controllers to relay warnings from ground systems could have serious consequences.
Honeywell test pilots Joe Duvall, left, and Clint Courtney fly a Boeing 757 test aircraft demonstrating a runway hazard warning system over the airport in Tyler, Texas, Tuesday, June 4, 2024. Credit: AP/LM Otero
“That’s in microseconds, but it’s 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 give a direct warning to the cockpit. This puts the tool in the hands of the pilots who are actually flying the aircraft. This technology is revolutionary.”
Honeywell plans to layer a cockpit warning system on top of technology already in widespread use to warn pilots if they are flying too low.
Accidents like the one at JFK are called runway incursions, which means a plane or ground vehicle is on the runway when it shouldn’t be. Some incursions happen when a pilot enters the runway without permission from air traffic controllers. Other incursions can occur when there aren’t enough planes to land or take off, which may be the fault of the pilot or the controller.
The number of incursions has fallen during the COVID-19 pandemic and has not returned to recent peaks of more than 2,000 recorded in 2016 and 2017. But the most serious incidents, where a crash was narrowly averted or there was a “potential for a serious crash,” have increased since 2017. There were 23 in the U.S. last year, up from 16 in 2022, according to FAA statistics.
A Boeing 757 test plane on approach to demonstrate a runway hazard warning system over Tyler, Texas, Tuesday, June 4, 2024, can be seen parked on the runway, creating a hazard. Credit: AP/LM Otero
Reducing intrusions has always been a priority for the FAA “because that’s where the greatest risks are in the aviation system,” said McCormick, a former FAA official.
The deadliest accident in aviation history occurred in 1977 on the Spanish island of Tenerife when a KLM 747 began to take off while a Pan Am 747 was still on the runway, and the two planes collided in heavy fog, killing 583 people.
Earlier this year, a Japan Airlines jetliner attempting to land in Tokyo collided with a Japan Coast Guard plane preparing to take off. Five crew members on the Japan Coast Guard plane were killed, but all 379 people on board the plane escaped before it was destroyed by fire.
The FAA has funded airport improvements to reduce incursions, such as reconfiguring confusing taxiways, and technology that would alert control tower personnel when a plane is about to land on a taxiway instead of a runway.
This kind of missed landing nearly happened in San Francisco in 2017, when an Air Canada jet landed at the last moment to avoid colliding with four other jets on a taxiway carrying a combined total of about 1,000 passengers.
The FAA is also moving forward with introducing simulators to train controllers in low visibility. The NTSB last week recommended the FAA require annual retraining after it determined that the controllers who nearly collided with a FedEx plane and a Southwest Airlines jet in heavy fog last year in Austin, Texas, had not trained in low visibility for at least two years.
The NTSB’s February 2023 investigation into the Austin close call also focused renewed attention on technology to warn cockpits of possible intrusions, and briefly mentioned a system under development by Honeywell. The system, which Honeywell calls “Surf-A” for surface alerting, has not been certified by the FAA, but the company believes it could be certified within the next 18 months.
The FAA’s best technology for runway incursion prevention is a system called ASDE-X, which allows air traffic controllers to track planes and vehicles on the ground. But the system is expensive and has only been installed at 35 of the 520 U.S. airports with control towers.
“Some people thought ASDE-X was the solution,” said former NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt, “but the problem is that airlines have a lot more than 35 airports. The products (that warn pilots in the cockpit) are deployed at every airport the plane goes to.”
Charlotte, North Carolina-based Honeywell began developing a cockpit warning system around 2008 and tried to convince airlines to back the idea, but never got any buy-in. The company put the project on hold in 2020 as the pandemic devastated the aviation industry.
Then, as air travel began to recover early last year, a series of dangerous plane crashes at major U.S. airports, including John F. Kennedy International Airport and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, attracted attention.
“Traffic was increasing, and we were seeing more near misses,” says Thea Feyereisen, part of the Honeywell team developing the system. It seemed like the perfect time to bring the warning system back.
“Previously when we spoke to airlines they weren’t interested. Last year we spoke to them again and now they are interested,” she said.
Still, Honeywell doesn’t have an initial customer, and company executives wouldn’t say how much it would cost to outfit the planes.
Feyereisen was asked whether the system could have prevented the close calls in New York and Austin.
“What the lawyers are saying is that it reduces the risk of a runway incursion, giving the pilot more time to decide, for example, whether to abort the landing and fly around the airport,” she said. “But the pilot still has to make the decision.”
