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‘Seconds count’: Avoiding airplane collisions at airports could come down to cockpit alerts
ABOARD A HONEYWELL TEST PLANE — Aerospace giant Honeywell is building new cockpit alerts that developers say will give airline pilots more precious time to react to hazards at airports.
Honeywell senior test pilot Capt. Kirk Vining late last month put the alerts — called Surface Alert, or SURF-A — to the test by recreating some of the most serious near disasters at airports in recent aviation history.
Moments before landing at Topeka Regional Airport, a Gulfstream G550 business jet was stopped on the same runway where Vining was about to touch down at the Kansas airport.
“Traffic on runway!” called out the automated alert in the cockpit of Honeywell’s test plane: a 43-year-old Boeing 757, as Vining pulled up, aborted his landing and flew around the airport safely.
Honeywell’s Boeing 757 test plane on the ground in Topeka, Kansas.
Erin Black/CNBC
A host of serious close calls in recent years has raised concerns about how to better avoid them in ever-more congested airports. The National Transportation Safety Board and other safety experts have urged more advanced cockpit alerts like the ones Honeywell is testing.
Runway incursions, when a plane, person or vehicle is on the runway when they shouldn’t be, averaged 4.5 a day last year. The Federal Aviation Administration categorizes them by severity, where the top and rarest two are: “a serious incident in which a collision was narrowly avoided” followed by “an incident in which separation decreases and there is a significant potential for collision may result in a time-critical corrective/evasive response to avoid a collision.”
Serious runway incursions at U.S. airports peaked at 22 in 2023, the most in at least a decade. The FAA has added new lighting and other safety technology at airports around the country to try to get to its goal of zero close calls.
‘Good at being a bad pilot’
“He’s very good at being a bad pilot,” Thea Feyereisen, a distinguished technical fellow for Honeywell Aerospace Technologies, said of Vining. Her unit develops new cockpit features for aviators, and she said she expects the new suite to win regulator certification next year.
“Seconds count when you’re operating near the runway, and the sooner you can let the pilots know of a potential serious situation, the better,” Feyereisen said.
The Honeywell test plane wasn’t configured like a regular passenger jet, and there weren’t any paying customers on board. It had a set of roomy seats toward the front of the plane, but in the back, Honeywell flight engineers were positioned at consoles, monitoring flight data and the alerts in real time. Earlier that day, Honeywell demonstrated the technology on a flight with Department of Transportation, FAA and NTSB officials on board, a company spokesman told CNBC.
Vining performed a simulation of another incident from 2023, when an American Airlines 777 bound for London crossed a runway where a Delta Air Lines 737 was taking off instead of holding short of the runway as an air traffic controller instructed. The Delta pilot in that situation aborted takeoff and both planes landed safely at their destinations.
Consoles aboard Honeywell’s test plane, a Boeing 757.
Magdalena Petrova/CNBC
Honeywell said its SURF-A alerts could have given the pilots 10 additional seconds of reaction time with a potential collision notice. The new program Honeywell is testing uses Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast, or ADS-B data, a GPS for an airplane.
“It’s usually a very good working environment between pilots, air traffic control, airport management,” Vining said. “We get it done safely, efficiently and smoothly. But you could also see just the slightest interruption, a little variation, and things can go wrong very quickly.”
The aerospace giant already offers another suite of alerts that tells pilots if they’re about to make a mistake like landing or taking off on a taxiway instead of a runway, for example, with visual alerts on a screen as well as aural warnings — “Caution! Taxiway!” The so-called Smart X package also alerts pilots if flaps are not set correctly, if the runway is too short, or if they are coming in too high or too fast, among other situations.
“As aircraft get closer to the airports where there are other airplanes that are also flying low to the ground, attempting to land, that’s the most dangerous spot to have a collision occur,” said Jeff Guzzetti, a retired air safety investigator with the NTSB and the FAA.
Those alerts have been on Alaska Airlines planes for years and, more recently, Southwest Airlines has added them. Honeywell said the alerts are currently flying on more than 3,000 planes operated by 20 airlines, but that’s still limited adoption with hundreds of carriers operating worldwide.
“Since we’ve implemented the software, I can’t think of an instance where we’ve had a runway incursion,” said Dave Hunt, Southwest’s vice president of safety and security and a 737 pilot.
American Airlines was also training its pilots on those alerts in the second quarter of the year, according to a lesson plan that was seen by CNBC. Last month, American received its first aircraft with the runway awareness and other alerts on board, a spokeswoman said, adding that its Boeing 737 pilots have now been trained on the tools.
The alerts aren’t required by regulators, but the FAA said it is “reviewing recommendations” from the Runway Safety Alerting Subgroup “to determine next steps,” referring to a group of airline, aerospace, pilot union, government and industry officials that last year recommended new planes include more advanced cockpit alerts in case of situational awareness issues at airports.
“The alerts occur further away from the runway so that if there’s an aircraft on the runway, you’re not having to make that decision very low to the ground,” said Jon Sites, director of flight operations safety at Alaska Airlines.
The Swiss cheese model
Honeywell’s test plane during a demonstration of new anti-collision warning technology.
Leslie Josephs/CNBC
The United States is the busiest aviation market in the world, with 44,000 flights, carrying 3 million travelers a day. Serious aviation accidents are rare, and fatal crashes are rarer still.
But a nearly 16-year streak without a fatal incident was broken on Jan. 29 when an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided into an American Airlines regional jet that was moments away from landing at Washington Reagan National Airport, killing the 67 people aboard the two aircraft and raising concerns about congested U.S. airspace to a fever pitch.
The aviation industry relies on a so-called Swiss cheese safety model, where each slice provides protection but comes with holes that are ideally covered when safety measures are stacked on top of one another.
“Aviation is built on layers of safety upon layers,” said Sites at Alaska Airlines.
Honeywell’s demonstration flight last month from Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport in Kansas City, Missouri, recreated a real incident that took place on a foggy morning in February 2023 in Austin, Texas, when a FedEx Boeing 767 plane aborted landing seconds before touching down on the same runway from which an air traffic controller cleared a Southwest 737 to take off.
The FedEx pilot had seen the outline of the Southwest plane through the fog and pulled up and later landed safely. Both flights continued to their destinations safely, but the two aircraft had gotten as close as 150 feet apart, less than the length of the FedEx 767, according to federal safety investigators.
Feyereisen said Honeywell’s technology could have provided the FedEx pilots in the 2023 Austin incident 28 seconds of advanced notice of traffic on the runway, when they only had a few moments to react, according to a report from the NTSB.
Not yet required
Engineers collect data aboard a Honeywell test plane.
Magdalena Petrova/CNBC
Feyereisen said the new technology could be retrofitted on older aircraft and is available for new jets.
“In general, the software costs tens of thousands of dollars [per plane], but not hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Feyereisen said. “So if you’re looking at [a] $150 million aircraft … it is less than a half a penny per passenger cost to the operation.”
Southwest this year added the software to its fleet of about 800 Boeing 737s. It cost between $20 million and $30 million to outfit the planes, Hunt said.
“It is cheaper than an accident,” he said.
On Feb. 25, a Southwest plane aborted its arrival after it was cleared to land at Chicago Midway International Airport when a Bombardier Challenger 350 business jet advanced onto its runway, with the Southwest jet passing less than 200 feet between the aircraft, before safely landing after a go-around, according to the NTSB.
Such close calls “are very, very rare, but obviously they’re something that are concerning and that we would try to mitigate as much as possible,” said Hunt. The Honeywell software is “very effective at ensuring our pilots are aware of where they are on the airport” and “does a really good job of preventing inadvertent runway incursions while taxiing,” he added.
Limitations
A Honeywell test pilot performs a go-around because of traffic on the runway at Topeka Regional Airport in Kansas as part of a demonstration.
Erin Black/CNBC
When developing the warnings, Feyereisen said it’s key not to overwhelm pilots with too much information, known as “nuisance alerts,” which could end up being a distraction from critical safety tasks rather than a help.
“If you’re blasting alerts through a cockpit speaker at low altitudes during a critical phase of flight, such as approach to landing or takeoff, where pilots’ attention needs to be fully focused … you create too many distractions,” Southwest’s Hunt said.
There are also limitations to the existing alerts and the new programs Honeywell is testing. To avoid in-air collisions, commercial aircraft are required to have what’s called the Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System, or TCAS, which helps them see traffic around them in displays in the cockpit. But that system is generally used for altitudes of at least 1,000 feet.
That would not have necessarily helped the pilots on the American Airlines plane that was below 400 feet in the fatal collision with the Black Hawk helicopter in January in Washington, D.C.
“We are exploring alternatives to close that gap where you kind of can merge TCAS and ADS-B-type information together,” Feyereisen said.
Sites, the safety director at Alaska, said the D.C. crash was “a huge, unexpected event in the industry, but it’s just, I think, our track record through the last 50 years shows that this is a very, very rare event.”
“That’s why we continue as an industry to try to find even better technology out there and enhancements to the current technology to keep this from ever happening and take the probability down to as low a level as possible,” he said. “I don’t know if in any aviation system you’ll ever get to zero, but I mean, we’re going to try to get as close to zero probability as we can.”
— CNBC’s Erin Black contributed to this report.
NEW DELHI: Govt on Saturday significantly increased export duties on diesel and aviation turbine fuel to dissuade oil refiners from exporting these fuels and to ensure adequate availability in the domestic market amid ongoing tensions in West Asia. The ministry of finance issued a series of notifications hiking the export duty on diesel by more than 150% – from Rs 21.5 per litre to Rs 55.5 per litre – with immediate effect. The levy on ATF, or jet fuel, was increased from Rs 29.5 per litre to Rs 42 per litre. The export duty on petrol continues to be nil. Under the revised structure, the special additional excise duty on high-speed diesel has been raised to Rs 24 per litre, while the road and infrastructure cess now stands at Rs 36 per litre, which means a large chunk will now flow to the Centre. Govt said these duties are not meant to boost revenue, but to stop fuel exporters from taking undue advantage of price differences. The Centre had, on March 27, imposed an export duty of Rs 21.5 per litre on diesel and Rs 29.5 per litre on ATF in a bid to check windfall gains, as fuel was in short supply in international markets due to a squeeze on energy supplies amid the military conflict and export curbs imposed by China. It had also slashed excise duty on diesel and petrol to shield consumers and oil companies from the impact of high crude prices. Retail prices of automobile fuels in India have not increased despite high volatility in the international crude market, while only a small part of the international price pressure has been passed on to domestic flights. The windfall tax on exports of diesel and ATF helps the Centre partly offset the impact of the excise duty cut. On March 27, govt had estimated revenue gains from export duties at around Rs 1,500 crore in a fortnight. The further hike in export duties is likely to lead to higher revenue gains. In a statement, the ministry of petroleum had said, “At a time when international diesel prices have surged sharply, the levy is designed to disincentivise exports and ensure that refinery output is directed first tow-ards meeting domestic demand.“
A convoy of vans, lorries, tractors, and even a limousine took part in a slow moving protest around the town centre on Saturday afternoon.
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Stock markets are as turbulent as they have ever been. Those not used to seeing their wealth jump and plunge from day to day might well be wary of trying them out for the first time.
But by investing for the longer term, investors who pick a stocks and sharesISA will almost certainly do better than those who play it safe by holding savings in cash – and they will never pay tax on any earnings.
The average stocks and sharesISA account is worth over £65,000, significantly higher than the typical cash ISA, which holds less than £13,500.
“With UK inflation elevated at around 3 per cent over the past year, it’s not a great time to be sitting on cash, especially given that over the past 12 months, the average stocks and sharesISA grew around 11 per cent, compared to an average return of 3.48 per cent for cash ISAs,” explained Dan Moczulski, eToro UK’s managing director.
With the new tax year’s allowance now in effect – worth £20,000 per person – we asked five experts to pick one fund they would be willing to buy into themselves.
While not recommendations for everybody, they offer food for thought, as well as better diversification and lower risk than buying individual company shares.
Scottish Mortgage FTSE 100
Annabel Brodie-Smith, communications director of the Association of Investment Companies (AIC)
Brodie-Smith is going for the Scottish Mortgage FTSE 100 investment trust managed by Baillie Gifford.
This company invests around the world in exciting private companies like SpaceX and Revolut, as well as public-listed companies like Meta, Nvidia and ASML.
Get a free fractional share worth up to £100.
Capital at risk.
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Get a free fractional share worth up to £100.
Capital at risk.
Terms and conditions apply.
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They are aiming to invest in the companies shaping the future – a mix of technology, healthcare, consumer services and more. The trust currently trades on a 5 per cent discount and has low charges of 0.31 per cent. This is an investment trust for long-term investors with a high appetite for risk.
This fund went up 27 per cent in the last year and is up 68 per cent over five years.
iShares Over 15 Years Gilts Index Fund (UK)
Alan Miller, CIO at SCM Direct
This fund tracks the FTSE Actuaries UK Conventional Gilts Over 15 Years Index and is therefore a fund investing solely in sterling-denominated UK government bonds, with a minimum remaining maturity of 15 years. It holds 27 gilts, has net assets of £2.95bn, and carries a Morningstar Gold medal.
There are no performance fees and a charge of just 0.1 per cent a year.
Miller says: “One of the most compelling opportunities in the market is hiding in plain sight: UK government bonds.
“Here’s the number that stops people in their tracks: 4.95 per cent compounded over 10 years is a 62 per cent return before charges, backed entirely by the UK government and sheltered from tax inside an ISA.”
Gilt yields are close to multi-decade highs. Locking in a yield to maturity of nearly 5 per cent inside an ISA wrapper, where all income and gains are tax-free, is exceptional by historical standards, and at an ongoing charge of just 0.1 per cent per annum, virtually nothing is lost to fees.
He adds: “Boring has rarely looked this good. It’s the kind of deal most active fund managers can only dream of offering.”
This fund is basically flat over the last year and up 9 per cent over five years. That’s because interest rates have been very low – as they are now higher, it should fare better from here.
Man Income
Paul Agnell, head of investment research, AJ Bell
Of the Man Income fund, Agnell says: “The fund’s pragmatic and analytical managers, Henry Dixon and Jack Barrat, invest in undervalued UK companies across the market cap spectrum, which are paying a yield at least in line with the market. In order to avoid value traps, the managers also look at a firm’s cashflow and assets.”
So, the team seek out undervalued and unloved companies, of which the UK market continues to present opportunities.
Their investment process centres on identifying two types of stocks: those trading below their replacement cost (what it would cost today to replace a company’s assets and operations) that are also cash generative, and those where the market appears to be undervaluing profit streams.
The fund has made an excellent start to 2026, up over 10 per cent in the first two months alone and was up 28 per cent over 2025. Banks were a key contributor over 2025, led by Lloyds, but with strong contributions also coming from Barclays and Standard Chartered.
The charge on the Man Income fund is 0.9 per cent.
Murray International
Philippa Maffioli, Blyth-Richmond Investment Managers
Murray International aims to blend global diversification with a solid income stream. The yield is around 3.5 per cent.
Maffioli says: “I like Murray International’s focus on dependable cashflows and sensible valuations, rather than chasing the highest yield. It also isn’t tied to the UK market, so you’re spreading risk across regions and currencies.”
Day-to-day decisions now sit with Martin Connaghan and Samantha Fitzpatrick, but the approach remains consistent: sustainable income with long-term growth potential. If you reinvest the dividends, it can be a strong compounding option over time.
It charges fees of 0.5 per cent. It is up 36 per cent in the last year and up 60 per cent over five years.
Pantheon Infrastructure Plc
Jonathan Moyes, head of investment research, Wealth Club
Pantheon Infrastructure Plc aims to provide investors with some diversification away from global stock markets while providing the potential for attractive equity-like returns over the longer term.
The FTSE 250 trust co-invests alongside some of the world’s leading infrastructure managers. Its portfolio includes large-scale data centres, gas distribution networks, US renewable energy and storage developers, as well as one of Europe’s leading temperature-controlled logistics and transport businesses.
Moyes says: “These assets are prized for their mission-critical nature and long-term contracted revenue streams. Nonetheless, shares in Pantheon Infrastructure change hands at an attractive 13 per cent discount to net asset value.”
That means the shares in the fund are valued more highly than the actual fund, which means easy wins – if that discount narrows. Trusts’ valuations do not always do so, while others might trade at a premium – in other words, more than the sum of their parts.
Investors should note this is a high-risk investment and should form part of a diversified portfolio. The trust has total ongoing charges of 1.29 per cent. The fund is up 30 per cent in the last year, but is too new for a five-year view.
Depending on which investment platform you use, and like any other fund, there may also be share dealing costs, so look to minimise those where you can so they don’t eat into your long-term returns.
When investing, your capital is at risk and you may get back less than invested. Past performance doesn’t guarantee future results.
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