BOEING FIELD -- Flying on an airliner is now as safe as it has ever been. But air safety experts are ever done improving air safety.
One worry today is fear of a collision on a runway. Humans remain very much part of our aviation system and human brains can make mistakes. Now, a new technology may help stop some of those mistakes.
The Honeywell Corporation makes lots of things, including cockpit avionics and their newest project already installed in some jets is called Smart Runway and Smart Landing. It's a software upgrade, with a computerized voice telling a pilot where he or she is, or warning them when they are about to make a mistake.
"These big airports can be very confusing," says Marcus Johnson, Honeywell's chief test pilot, who runs these electronics through their paces aboard a company owned Beech King Air based at Everett's Paine Field.
In a demonstration ride, he demonstrates just what Smart Runway and Landing can do. Because the system relies on GPS, it knows within a few feet where the plane is and compares that location to the position on a computerized map inside a computer.
Say you're about to takeoff on a taxiway. The voice will yell out and a visual warning will flash on the weather radar display that you're on a taxiway and not on a runway.
Let's say a pilot landing in poor visibility is about to touch down when there's not enough runway. The computer will warn the pilot just how much runway he has left, or doesn't in thousand foot intervals.
Sometimes it's just a confidence builder, saying you're on the right runway, and not on the wrong one.
This use of GPS technology combined with mapping has already proved itself starting in the 1990s. That's when Honeywell came up with the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System. That system uses flight data such as direction, altitude and location, compares it to the map and says to itself that if you continue on this path you're going to run into a mountain, or into a TV tower or even a building. The technology is now required on airliners and has put a stop to the most common type of disaster -- flying a perfectly good airplane into the ground. Pilots call it CFIT, Controlled Flight Into Terrain.
Smart Runway and Smart Landing is basically a software add on to EGPWS. But while it raises pilot awareness it's not quite able to tell you a plane is about to roll into your path. But that will soon change.
"Down the road our airplane is going to talk to the other airplanes, and they'll talk to each other and the margin of safety will only get better," says Johnson.
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