Tech designed to prevent runway collisions tested in Washington

Already this year, worldwide there have been eight notable incidents, including a terrible accident in Japan. On Jan. 2, a Japan Airlines Airbus A350 with 379 people on board landing in Tokyo collided with a de Havilland Canada Dash 8-Q300 operated by the Japan Coast Guard that was crossing the runway.

The collision immediately ignited fires that destroyed both aircraft. Five of the six crew on board the Dash 8 died. Everyone on board the A350 escaped before a fireball engulfed the plane.

In a preflight briefing last week, Thea Feyereisen, a senior technical fellow at Honeywell specializing in human factors — the science of understanding how humans interact with machines and respond when systems go wrong — said, “You can understand why people are getting quite nervous.”

Airline pilots routinely flying U.S. routes recognize “the near misses are getting nearer and nearer,” she said. “And it scares them.”

Could a collision similar to the one in Tokyo happen in the U.S.? “Most folks in the safety business recognize that it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when,” said Feyereisen.

Which is why Feyereisen’s team at Honeywell, led by Yasuo Ishihara, has developed the Surf-A technology (for “Surface Alert”) installed on that 757.

Both Feyereisen and Ishihara were trained and mentored for years by the late Don Bateman, the legendary engineer who invented an electronic box that delivered to flight crews a “ground-proximity warning system” that is standard on all aircraft today and credited with saving thousands of lives.

Surf-A aims to eliminate runway incursion accidents with unmissable cockpit warnings that will provide pilots time to avert a collision.

The system takes positioning data from electronic boxes already installed on every commercial airplane that pinpoints the speed, heading and location of all aircraft in the vicinity and integrates that with geographical data about the layout of the runways at airports.

When the data shows a pending runway collision, the system gives the pilot warnings to change course.

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