Honeywell recently brought its Boeing 757 testbed to Kansas City to demonstrate its ground safety cockpit tech. Included in this demo were its newest runway safety addition—Surface Alerts (Surf-A)—along with its already-certified SmartRunway/SmartLanding (Smart X), which helps pilots avoid wrong-surface events and runway excursions. Both create direct cockpit alerts hosted on Honeywell Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System (EGPWS) units.
While Smart X has been available for roughly a decade, Honeywell expects Surf-A certification on transport-category aircraft next year, pending approvals and ongoing successful flight tests and demos on the 757. Surf-A is an EGPWS-hosted software upgrade, designed to be retrofitted across a broad installed base.
During a preflight media briefing, Thea Feyereisen, senior technical fellow at Honeywell Aerospace Technologies, outlined three risk areas these technologies are built to address: wrong-surface operations, runway excursions, and runway incursions.
Smart X provides aural and visual cues such as “on taxiway,” “flaps, flaps,” “too high,” “unstable,” and “long landing.” These cues alert pilots in real time to high-energy approaches, configuration errors, and wrong-surface alignments when their attention is outside the cockpit during high-workload phases of flight.
Surf-A extends that protection to runway incursions by using ADS-B data and trajectory analysis to warn pilots when another aircraft or vehicle in the runway engagement zone creates a collision risk within roughly 30 seconds. Pilots can hear four distinct callouts: “traffic on runway,” “traffic on final,” “traffic intersecting runway,” and “traffic behind,” with supporting text on the display.
“The NTSB has recommended direct alerts for the pilots,” Feyereisen said, emphasizing the potential time savings of bypassing controller-to-pilot radio latency in time-critical situations. Cockpit alerts can also step in to save the day when busy airspace radio traffic might mean radio calls get lost or stepped on.
During the demo flight, Honeywell recreated two high-profile close calls widely discussed in industry safety forums to show how cockpit alerting technology could give pilots more time to respond in critical moments. In February 2023 at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, a landing FedEx Boeing 767 and a departing Southwest B737 came within seconds of collision. The testbed aircraft approached a runway surface with a Gulfstream already on the active surface; as it neared the runway, a visual and aural alert showed “traffic on runway,” and the pilots initiated a go-around. The February 2023 incident was noteworthy in that the field was obscured by fog and controllers could not see that the Boeing 737 had taxied onto the active runway.
A second scenario mirrored a January 2023 New York JFK event in which an American Airlines B777 taxied onto an active runway as a Delta B737 was taking off. During this demonstration, Honeywell’s Boeing 757 testbed began its takeoff roll on the runway, and the cooperating Gulfstream taxied across the runway in front of it. An alert in the cockpit advised pilots of the traffic intersecting the runway; the pilots had ample time to react while it was still difficult to see the crossing airplane in the distance.
Flight engineers on board Honeywell’s B757 coordinated each demonstration with the pilots of both aircraft. The pilots coordinated with air traffic control to ensure safety during the demonstration.
Honeywell also showcased Smart X’s excursion-mitigation function in which pilots approached the runway with a deliberately unstable approach: missing flaps configuration (“flaps, flaps”), approaching above the glidepath (“too high”), failing to stabilize (“unstable”), then floating beyond the aim point (“long landing”), with distance-remaining callouts. Honeywell’s pilots then demonstrated a simulated taxiway-takeoff lineup, prompting an “on taxiway” alert around 40 knots groundspeed, underscoring the value of an aural prompt before brake energy or runway length becomes limiting.
On June 16, Honeywell announced that Southwest Airlines is “in the process of activating its entire Boeing 737 aircraft fleet” with SmartRunway/SmartLanding via the EGPWS already on the aircraft, with “more than 700 aircraft…activated to date.”
Feyereisen framed Surf-A as a “third set of eyes” complementing existing tower-based systems: ground-side tools can alert controllers, she said, but they do not always warn pilots directly, and simultaneous radio transmissions can mask urgent calls. “Pilots are the last line of defense,” she said, noting Honeywell’s effort to tune Surf-A thresholds to minimize nuisance alerts while preserving early warning.
Uptake of the technologies remains shaped by regulatory, cost, and operator process considerations. Honeywell executives said that roughly 20% to 25% of commercial aircraft globally use Smart X-type capabilities—a figure consistent with Honeywell’s assertion that “about 5,000 commercial aircraft,” or roughly 20% of the fleet, have SmartRunway/SmartLanding installed. While Alaska Airlines adopted early, and Southwest is now moving fleetwide, broader deployment will depend on airline training timelines and regulatory direction.
Honeywell first previewed 30-second incursion alerts and the four-callout scheme last year on flights between Seattle and Yakima, Washington, with a then-projected 12- to 18-month path to approval. Honeywell now expects transport-category certification in 2026, while continuing to explore forward-fit display enhancements under the Surf-A program with OEM partners.
With global traffic growing and runway infrastructure largely fixed, layers of protection matter. Smart X aims to break the chain that leads to excursions and wrong-surface events, while Surf-A is intended to buy pilots time to avoid incursions. “Every second counts,” Feyereisen concluded.