Honeywell's Dean Flatt was unsure whether his company should go ahead with its Runway Awareness and Advisory System (RAAS) - until he found himself landing at a dark, snow-covered airport and couldn't see where to taxi.
"I was travelling to Washington DC for a meeting," recalls the president of Aerospace Electronic Systems. "I was running very late and had to land at Dulles at around 01:30. The weather was closing in fast, the airport was closed up for the night and the business jet pilots called me forward as they couldn't work out where to go after they had landed.
"I went up front as I know Dulles quite well, but with just a little snow, the whole place was transformed. You couldn't tell runway from taxiway.
"It was at that point that I realised RAAS had a future and made the decision - we went ahead with RAAS," Flatt says.
Flatt continues that there are always good economic reasons why a project should or shouldn't proceed. But he believes the honest truth is that RAAS will prevent accidents and help pilots' situational awareness - period.
"We have a database covering every single air accident for more than 25 years. It's very clear that many accidents where aircraft have taken off or landed on taxiways, or where they become lost, could have been prevented if pilots had just known where they were," he says.
In the USA alone, the FAA reports an average of more than 400 runway incursions on towered airports each year. Figures from the CAA suggest that the number is increasing year on year.
The aviation disaster at Tenerife in 1977, when 583 people died, occurred on a runway. Recent accidents involving a Singapore Airlines Boeing 747 in Taipei and an SAS Boeing MD80 in Milan were also both runway-related.
RAAS uses a Global Positioning System (GPS) and an internal runway database to monitor the aircraft's location on or near the airport. The system then provides aural advisory messages if the aircraft approaches a runway, either while in the air or on the ground; is aligned on a runway for take-off or taxi; is on a runway too short for a safe take-off or landing; or if the pilot attempts to take off from a taxiway.
Differentiate
The system has other warnings, which a female voice announces. But why female? "The voice on our Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System (EGPWS) is male, so our lab felt that from a pilot/machine interface point of view, a female voice would help differentiate RAAS," Flatt says.
A lot of research also went into what aural warnings should be provided and when. "We put pilots into a simulator and tried out various ideas to see what they liked and what they didn't," says Flatt. "At the end of the day it's the pilots who have to use RAAS so it had to work for them."
The launch customer for RAAS is Alaska Airlines, which was also an early adopter of Honeywell's EGPWS when it was launched. Alaska chose RAAS to counter the poor weather and snowstorms that often affect its routes. And Dean Flatt now has first-hand experience of why they wanted it.
STEVE NICHOLS
Source: Flight Daily News
