Honeywell Expands Guided Visual Approach List to 120

Honeywell Aerospace’s FMS guided visual (FGV) team has now developed 120 of the RNAV H approaches that help pilots fly autopilot-coupled visual approaches to runway ends at challenging airports across the globe. By flying these procedures, pilots receive guidance that helps them keep the airplane stable with minimal bank angles in a consistent, repeatable flight path.

Several accidents have occurred where business jet pilots lose aircraft control during a visual approach in good weather. The purpose of FGV approaches is to give pilots guidance in the form of a visual approach procedure that can be loaded into the flight management system (FMS) and used to fly to the runway end. Honeywell released its first FGV approach in 2023, as an additional database subscription for most aircraft equipped with Honeywell FMS. The $2,000-per-year database provides access to every FGV approach that Honeywell has developed.

Honeywell isn’t the only avionics company to offer guided visual approaches. Garmin, in partnership with Hughes Aerospace, also offers a database upgrade with more than 60 guided visual approaches, many to the same airports and runways as Honeywell’s.

While FGV approaches can be loaded and flown either by hand or better by autopilot, it should be noted that these are visual procedures to be flown in VMC. They are not a substitute for IFR approaches and also not designed to replace a circling procedure at the end of an IFR approach.

Erik Tobler, a Honeywell Flight Technical Services technical pilot, took over the company’s guided visual approach program about two years ago and has overseen development of more than 100 visual approaches. The pace of development is now eight to 10 approaches per month, so the number keeps growing.

Tobler wants to make sure that pilots understand that these procedures are for guidance only. “If you look at the plan view on the chart, it uses the symbology for a visual track along the ground,” he said. He also likes to explain Honeywell’s five tenets or best practices that come with the use of FGV approaches.

• “These are visual approaches, period,” he said. “Terrain, obstacles, see-and-avoid [traffic] is still the responsibility of the flight crew.”
• “Right-of-way rules still apply. Even if you're utilizing this guidance, it does not mean that you can cut someone off or not have to play nice with another aircraft, especially at an uncontrolled field.”
• “Don’t expect an ATC clearance for these RNAV H visual procedures.” While some controllers are aware of guided visual approaches, they will not issue a clearance to fly such an approach. Pilots can fly these procedures without clearance, although educating controllers about them will be productive in the long run.
• Tobler cautioned pilots not to try to copy an FGV approach by plugging waypoint locations into their FMS. “All you need to do is load it in the FMS to pull it up as an approach procedure.” These approaches are designed with lateral and vertical guidance, which is difficult to replicate with a hand-built approach.
• “Read the chart carefully.” Each FGV approach comes as an RNAV H chart, and there are many notes that pilots should read and brief before commencing an approach.

When it comes to working with controllers, for example, at Chicago Executive Airport where the RNAV H Rwy 34 approach skirts close to the edge of Chicago’s Class B airspace, Honeywell added a note on the chart to “let ATC know that you are on the Honeywell visual,” Tobler said. “Then the trained controllers can be notified by the pilots that because they’re using the procedure, they’re not going to fly into O’Hare Bravo airspace. Some of those base-to-final turns get pretty close to the Bravo, and if the controller doesn’t know what to expect, [they will be] biting their nails a little bit and saying, ‘Is this aircraft going to stay out of Bravo or not?’ By the pilot…saying, ‘Hey, we are on the Honeywell visual,’ the controller can relax and say, ‘Oh, okay, they're on the lateral path that we expect will stay clear of Bravo.’ That's been working out pretty well.”

Honeywell has been developing more FGV approaches in Europe, overlaying visual maneuvering with prescribed track (VPT) procedures. VPTs are like charted visual procedures in the U.S., with waypoints defined by ground reference points that must be acquired visually. VPTs aren’t coded in FMS databases, however, and Honeywell’s overlaid FGV approaches give the pilot a much easier way to fly to the end of the runway in mountainous terrain. A recently added example is France’s Basel-Mulhouse Airport (LFSB), which had a temporary runway closure. The FGV approach there guides pilots to shorter Runway 25, which has a VPT procedure.

Feedback from pilots using the Honeywell FGV approaches has been positive, with many saying that their operations are experiencing improved flight data monitoring results at airports where they fly the RNAV H procedures. One customer recently reported that they were able to land their Gulfstream G500 on Aspen Airport’s Runway 33 after flying the RNAV H procedure, while other pilots were diverting to Rifle, Colorado, due to high winds from the north. “The stable approach criteria [compliance] is awesome to hear,” Tobler said, “but it's nice to hear also that we're helping them adhere to the plan that they wanted to fly to the destination.”

Tobler and Honeywell senior technical sales manager Carey Miller test fly all of the FGV approaches in the company’s avionics simulator. “We stress test all of these visual procedures in that lab environment,” Tobler said. “We fly them fast…coming in too high, we do the go-around procedures. We try all of the entry transition points, to make sure, did our coding get done right? Does it work? Are there any discontinuities? Does the procedure match the chart that we've put together with Jeppesen?”

In some cases, at the most challenging airports, Honeywell’s flight-test group will fly the approach in the company’s G550. This is being done for a new Telluride, Colorado (KTEX), RNAV H approach. “You're dealing with very high true airspeeds and a lot of terrain,” he said. “We want to help maintain confidence that our procedures provide good visual guidance, and sometimes it takes getting to a little bit higher fidelity when we test them.”