Incidents of controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) remain depressingly high among aircraft without the advantage of enhanced ground proximity warning systems (EGPWS).
Frank Daly, president, Air Transport, Honeywell Aerospace Electronic Systems, says: "Since the first introduction of ground proximity warning systems (GPWS) in 1971 and the subsequent deployment of EGPWS in 1996, the incidence of air transport CFIT has been steadily brought down to less than one-fifth of its previous levels."
Major countries throughout the world will require aircraft used in scheduled passenger service to have EGPWS or a similar system by 2005. Most major airlines have already equipped most of their fleets.
Unfortunately, says Daly, CFIT remains a problem among privately-owned aircraft, cargo aircraft, military aircraft and even commercial aircraft in the more remote parts of the world because they don't have the advantage of EGPWS.
"If we had not developed GPWS and EGPWS when we did, we would be experiencing far more than 25-30 CFIT accidents a year because of the big increases in total air traffic since then," says Daly.
Honeywell (Hall A/712) has delivered more than 50,000 of its combined GPWS and EGPWS sets.
Source: Flight Daily News