SURF-A Adds Critical Runway Safety Protection

“Aeromexico announces plans to provide pilots with advanced Honeywell Aerospace technology to avoid accidents and close calls during taxi, takeoff and landing."

Honeywell Aerospace Traffic and Surveillance Product Director Priya Poyil uses Swiss cheese to describe aviation’s layered approach to runway safety, which combines technologies, procedures and human intervention to help prevent serious accidents.

"At the 2026 Farnborough International Airshow in July, Aeromexico announced it intends to adopt SURF-A across its entire Boeing 737 NG and 737 MAX fleet of more than 100 aircraft. This makes Mexico’s national airline an early adopter of this next-generation technology, demonstrating its commitment to providing pilots with advanced situational awareness during taxi, takeoff and landing.”

Modern runway safety relies on multiple layers, including pilot procedures, training, airport signage and lighting, ground surveillance and safety systems, air traffic control coordination and – now more than ever – advanced cockpit alerting technologies.

“Pilots are the last line of defense against runway incidents and accidents because they are in command of the aircraft and can take immediate action to avoid a conflict,” Poyil emphasized. “Cockpit alerting technologies like SURF-A provide the right information to the right people – the pilots –at the right time.”

Our SURF-A technology alerts pilots about potential runway conflicts during taxi, takeoff and landing operations. The system detects when another aircraft is on, approaching or crossing an active runway and provides visual and aural warnings so pilots can take evasive action. A new version called SURF-A (indications and alerts) adds a cockpit display of traffic and potential conflicts to improve situational awareness.

We expect SURF-A certification on the Boeing 757 and Boeing 737 NG and MAX models by the end of 2026. According to Honeywell Aerospace Senior Test Pilot Kirk Vining, we are using our own Boeing 757 flying testbed for flight tests and demonstrations.

"With the appropriate safety margins in place, we set our Boeing 757 on a collision course with another Honeywell Aerospace test aircraft during taxi, takeoff, and landing," Vining said. "This lets us test SURF-A in a variety of challenging scenarios. The system will undoubtedly improve runway safety because it provides clear, urgent aural alerts in collision-risk situations. The feedback we have received during the demos has been very positive and useful to our development team.”

Runway incursions, close calls, wrong-surface operations and overruns continue to rank among the aviation industry’s most critical safety challenges. Runway incursions, close calls, wrong-surface operations and overruns continue to rank among the aviation industry’s most critical safety challenges. Recent incidents in Nice, France, at New York’s LaGuardia Airport and elsewhere have heightened concerns about serious runway incursions, close calls and other ground safety events at busy airports.

In response, the FAA has identified hundreds of “hot spots” across the U.S. to highlight runways with complex layouts, heavy traffic or a history of close calls. Of greatest concern are serious Category A and B incidents involving a collision or a close call that require pilots to take immediate evasive action.

Runway incursions (when an aircraft, vehicle or person is incorrectly present on an active runway) and runway excursions (when an aircraft unintentionally departs the runway surface during takeoff or landing) rank among the most frequent causes of serious aviation accidents, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), even though commercial aviation accidents remain exceedingly rare.

SURF-A and SURF-IA technologies flow directly from our pioneering work on the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System (EGPWS) technology introduced in 1996. The two apply the same predictive, pilot-focused approach to aviation safety.

“SURF-A extends the legacy of Honeywell Aerospace visionary Don Bateman,” said Distinguished Technical Fellow Thea Feyereisen. “Don envisioned using the same predictive safety principles that revolutionized terrain awareness to help pilots identify and avoid hazards on the runway. SURF-A realizes Don’s dream for achieving ever-higher levels of aviation safety.”

The system acts like an extra set of eyes for pilots while an aircraft is operating on or near a runway, she explained. “SURF-A uses GPS, automatic dependent surveillance–broadcast (ADS-B) traffic data and detailed airport maps to constantly compare the aircraft’s position, speed and direction with the location and movement of other nearby aircraft.

SURF-A alerts the flight crew if another aircraft is entering, crossing or occupying the same runway in a potentially dangerous way so the pilots can assess the situation and act quickly if necessary to avoid conflict. SURF-A provides aural and visual alerts of a potential runway collision, while SURF-IA adds graphical cockpit displays that show nearby traffic and potential conflict areas directly on the airport surface map.

We have made airline and business aviation safer for more than 20 years with our runway safety innovations, starting with the runway awareness and advisory system (RAAS) introduced in 2004. The Honeywell Aerospace RAAS became one of aviation’s first cockpit-based runway safety technologies.

“RAAS software is hosted within the EGPWS platform,” Feyereisen said. “It uses GPS and  a high precision runway database to give pilots aural advisories confirming their runway position and operations. The system can announce alerts such as ‘Approaching Runway 25L,’ ‘On Runway 18,’ and ‘Thousand Feet Remaining’ and provide warnings if an aircraft begins accelerating on a taxiway instead of a runway, ‘On Taxiway!’”

Five years later, RAAS evolved into what became known as the SmartX offering, which includes SmartRunway and SmartLanding. SmartRunway adds visual messaging and enhanced aural advisories to improve energy and position awareness on approach. SmartLanding focuses on preventing runway excursions by alerting pilots to unstable approach conditions such as excessive speed, excessive altitude, insufficient runway remaining and long landings. It also adds protection to mis-set altimeters, which can contribute to dangerous premature descent on approach.

Our runway safety technologies are widely deployed across commercial and business aviation fleets worldwide. Airlines including Emirates, Alaska Airlines, Ryanair and Southwest Airlines, have adopted elements of the SmartX portfolio across their fleets.

As airports grow busier and runway environments become more complex, aircraft need a new era of runway safety technology to maintain their high safety standards. Technologies pioneered decades ago to help pilots avoid terrain and airborne collision hazards are now being adapted to the airport surface, bringing new levels of situational awareness and safety directly into the cockpit.

“SURF-A represents something the aviation industry increasingly needs: a practical and scalable safety upgrade for existing aircraft fleets that can be deployed now, not just years from now on new aircraft not yet built,” Poyil said. “The future of runway safety will depend on many elements and layers of protection, but cockpit-based intuitive tools for pilots, like SURF-A and SmartX are among the most critical and easily deployable.”