Text and voice alerts would notify pilots of nearby aircraft
Today’s lexicon of automated cockpit alerts include such classics as “Pull up! Pull up!” and “Terrain! Terrain!” If Honeywell Aerospace Technologies has its way, pilots could soon get a new one: “Traffic on runway! Traffic on runway!”
The Phoenix-based avionics developer this month concluded the latest round of flight tests and demonstrations of its Surface Alert, or SURF-A. Honeywell is targeting June 2026 to receive FAA approval for this collision alert software to be installed in Boeing 757s.
SURF-A is designed to warn pilots when their aircraft is on course to collide with another plane. The software detects the locations of nearby aircraft from the signals broadcast by their Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADS-B, transmitters and then plots their positions on a virtual map of the airport runways. If the software’s algorithms determine that a collision may occur, it issues a text alert to one of the cockpit displays. If pilots don’t take action, voice alerts sound 30 seconds and 15 seconds before the aircraft would intersect.
SURF-A can access the runway maps of 5,000 airports around the world, which live in a database that is preloaded into Honeywell’s Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System. Some 90% of today’s commercial planes already carry Honeywell’s version of this avionics box, which provides terrain collision avoidance warnings. For an additional subscription, operators can upgrade EGPSW to also issue text and verbal alerts meant to prevent pilots from taking off or landing on a taxiway instead of a runway. SURF-A, if certified by FAA, would be provided as a software upgrade that also requires a subscription.
In early April, Honeywell flew its 757 test aircraft equipped with SURF-A at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California in a series of flights that re-created the conditions of various near-collisions that have occurred at U.S. airports in recent years. One of these tests emulated a 2023 close call in Austin, Texas, in which a FedEx 767 cargo plane came within 30 meters of landing on a Southwest Airlines 737 that was taking off from the same runway. The Honeywell 757 played the role of the incoming FedEx plane, and a King Air turboprop stood in for the Southwest airliner.
In its final report of that incident, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board largely attributed the mix-up to the air traffic controller’s poor visibility of the runway due to dense fog but noted that some manner of “flight deck alerting system would also help prevent runway incursions by providing timely notification to a flight crew about potential traffic conflicts.”
Based on publicly available information of the Austin incident, Honeywell believes events would have played out differently if one or both of the planes had been equipped with SURF-A. The pilot of the FedEx plane would have received a “Traffic on runway!” alert when the plane was at an altitude of 420 feet, and then again at 15 seconds if the pilot did not pull up from the landing trajectory, says Thea Feyereisen, senior technical fellow at Honeywell and creator of SURF-A. As for the Southwest airliner, she says the software would have issued a text message on a cockpit display before the plane reached the runway, another text 52 seconds before the potential collision, and then a “Traffic on final!” voice alert at 30 seconds and at 15 seconds, if one of the planes was not maneuvered from the collision path.
The timing of the alerts was something Honeywell paid particular attention to, Feyereisen told me in an interview. The initial SURF-A warnings are sent via text so as not to overwhelm pilots. Because planes frequently take off and land within a minute of each other at busy airports, any voice warning issued more than 30 seconds before a predicted collision could become just a boy-who-cried-wolf annoyance to pilots.
“You want to give it to them in enough time to respond, but you also don’t want to give it to them too soon, or it becomes a nuisance,” she says.
Following the Mojave tests, Honeywell conducted other flights with the software at Southwest Georgia Regional Airport in Albany, Georgia, to demonstrate SURF-A for “major domestic airline operators,” a company spokesman told me.
To receive FAA certification, Honeywell must demonstrate that SURF-A correctly alerts pilots to potential collisions, minimizes nuisance alerts when other aircraft are not present and prompts pilots to take the correct action to avoid a collision. One way Honeywell accounted for that in the SURF-A design was considering the tone in which the voice alerts are delivered, Feyereisen says, and she helped coach the voice actors who recorded the SURF-A messages to make sure their intonations were right.
“You want to call attention, but you don’t want to cause panic,” she says. “You want a particular cadence to the message as well, and emphasis.”
Customers will be able to choose between a male or female version of the voice alerts. Once the 757 version of SURF-A is certified, Honeywell plans to seek FAA certification to install SURF-A in 737s and European Union Aviation Safety Agency certification to put the software in new and existing Airbus aircraft.
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