By the time the next Paris air show rolls around in 2027, Honeywell Aerospace will have undergone something of a transformation.
At present, part of the broader Honeywell International Inc – one of those industrial conglomerates like General Electric or United Technologies that seems to have gone out of fashion – the aerospace unit sits alongside two other divisions: advanced materials and automation.
But last year, under pressure from activist investors, the corporation decided that all three divisions would be spun out as stand-alone listed entities. Advanced materials – to be known in future as Solstice Advanced Materials – will be first to leave the nest later in 2025, while the separation of automation and aerospace will occur next year.
To give a sense of scale, Honeywell Aerospace in 2024 generated sales of $15.4 billion – around 40% of the group’s total – putting it firmly in the higher reaches of the top 20 aerospace companies globally, but some way short of, say, RTX ($80 billion in revenue) or even Safran ($31 billion).
Nonetheless, Honeywell Aerospace chief executive Jim Currier views the split with confidence. “As we look to the future, Honeywell Aerospace is poised for its next great chapter,” he said on the eve of this year’s Paris show.
It was, he suggested, “not just another air show” but a “big moment” for the business as it prepares for the separation and the start of “new era”.
But Honeywell Aerospace is “not starting from scratch”, instead it is “building on a foundation of strength that has been crafted for more than 100 years”, he says, adding: “We are preparing to write the next chapter of our story, one that’s powered by bold ambition but anchored in performance.”
Hyperbole? Possibly, but there is a grain of truth in Currier’s words given the multiple storied brands – think Bendix, Garrett, Sperry and others – that are Honeywell Aerospace’s constituent parts.
“We are big enough to stand alone,” he says. “Think about where we are today: we are on every single aircraft that flies in the free world.”
Essentially, the company is in every single segment – commercial, business aviation and defence – and also has a presence across fixed- and rotary-wing aviation.
“My point is that we are embedded within the fabric of the aerospace industry,” he adds.
On a practical level, the spin-out means that Honeywell Aerospace can now do whatever is good for Honeywell Aerospace, rather than having to consider what might be required by the wider corporation.
“What the separation affords us is the ability to be autonomous in how we want to deploy capital and invest back into the company,” says Currier.
“Every single decision we make, every single day… will be 100% focused on the business itself. We will be 100% focused on just our business.”
For instance, that should make the company more agile when it comes to potential acquisitions or other portfolio-shaping activities.
As there’s nothing on the immediate horizon in terms of acquisitions or disposals – the spin-out complicates such transactions – Honeywell Aerospace’s immediate priority is to build on its position as a provider of “high-tech, high-value systems that deliver throughout their lifecycle”, using operational feedback to drive “innovation for next-generation platforms”.
Take the company’s enhanced ground proximity warning system – better known by its EGPWS abbreviation – a safety feature designed to prevent controlled flight into terrain.
EGPWS has already “saved countless lives”, says Currier, but is being enhanced with surface alert software (SURF-A). When this enters service in 2026 it is “poised to dramatically reduce potential runway accidents” by providing aural and visual alerts if there is “unexpected traffic on the runway”.
Underpinning the development of SURF-A has been operator feedback and data analysis which revealed a tripling of serious runway safety incidents over the last six years, says Bob Buddecke, president, electronic solutions.
“The data on this is very compelling – it’s a call to action. The need for change is obvious and the urgency with which we need to approach it is even more obvious,” he says.
Honeywell Aerospace has been demonstrating the efficacy of the system using its Boeing 757 testbed and another aircraft parked where it should not be.
“We’ll bring the 757 in for approach and the technology provides the pilot with up to 30 seconds – which is a lifetime in a safety-sensitive situation – of additional warning of a potential obstruction on a runway,” he says.
Also sitting within Buddecke’s portfolio is the company’s new Anthem compact avionics suite. Although it is suitable for all market segments, its first application will be on Vertical Aerospace’s VX4 electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft.
Similarly, the lightweight electro-mechanical actuators and ATTUNE cabin management system developed by Honeywell Aerospace’s control systems business have been selected by Archer Aviation for its Midnight eVTOL, while Electra’s Ultra Short aircraft will use similar actuators and fly-by-wire controls.
Honeywell Aerospace sees such eVTOL programmes as an area of future growth and five years ago established a dedicated unit to look after the nascent advanced air mobility (AAM) sector.
Given the so-far unproven nature of many AAM concepts, Honeywell Aerospace is effectively betting on which programmes will succeed. Not all will pay out, however, as the collapse of Lilium illustrates; Honeywell Aerospace was both a supplier to and an investor in the German eVTOL developer.
Headed by David Shilliday, the AAM operation has much in common with Honeywell Aerospace’s other arms, he says, but “where my customers might be a little different is the pace at which they need it – the pace at which they need the first product, the pace at which they need us to certify the product, the pace at which they need us to iterate the product and make it better”.
But there is an advantage from this constant need for innovation; it provides the business with “enormous opportunities to evolve and improve our products in these sandboxes before they land in other more-traditional end markets”, says Shilliday.
Of course, not everything can be developed internally, and the business continues to dip into the M&A market where necessary, for example in March last year acquiring for €200 million ($234 million) Italy-based Civitanavi Systems, a developer of high-precision inertial navigation and stabilisation solutions.
Andrea Pizzarulli, general manager of Civitanavi, says that while joining a business with Honeywell Aerospace’s scale was a “big jump”, it has boosted growth.
“It gives us something that was missing – there were things I could not have done on my own.”
Besides expanding its presence in Europe – and offering ITAR-free equipment to non-US defence customers – Honeywell Aerospace says Civitanavi’s capabilities will be combined with its long-standing navigation system prowess to progress on a path towards autonomous flight.
That topic, says Shilliday, illustrates one of the company’s key strengths: being able to draw on and fuse expertise from multiple business units, from the navigation and sensor systems on one side, to flight controls and actuators on the other, and the know-how to link them together “in a unique way”.
In a sense, that slice of the business is representative of the modern Honeywell Aerospace. Although it started out making components – the T55 engines that power the Boeing CH-47 Chinook, for instance – its modern iteration is very much as a systems supplier, argues Currier.
As aircraft become more complex, “being able to provide systems to solve complex issues is where we bring value”, he says.
