Lufthansa Joins Runway Safety System
July 18 2016 - 9:00PM
Dow Jones News
The parent company of German carrier Deutsche Lufthansa AG has
agreed to help test technology Airbus Group SE and Honeywell
International Corp. have proposed to jointly develop to prevent
airliners from careening off the ends of runways during
landings.
A memorandum of understanding among the three companies was
signed last week during the Farnborough Airshow outside London,
according to people familiar with the details. The Airbus-Honeywell
effort was previously reported but not Lufthansa's role in the
project.
Under the agreement, Lufthansa Group will help with engineering
development, and it will also make planes available for testing of
proposed runway safeguards combining various elements of
proprietary safety systems already marketed separately by Airbus
and Honeywell. Such an offering would meet impending European
safety rules to combat what are called runway excursions, these
people said, while possibly circumventing opposition by BoeingÂ
Co. and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to any joint
U.S.-European standards or mandatory regulations in this arena.
For Airbus, the agreement is part of a broader companywide push
to grow the digital services and satellite-connectivity parts of
its business for both commercial and military customers.
The Airbus system, called ROPS, is focused on determining the
energy and inertia of the plane right before and after touchdown.
It aims to alert cockpit crews if they won't be able to stop safely
on a runway, based among other things on weather and tarmac
conditions.
At the same time, Honeywell has been marketing what it calls
SmartLanding, a system designed to warn pilots when their approach
trajectory indicates they are too high, too fast or will land too
far down a runway.
By combining both systems into a new offering, Airbus hopes to
encourage more airlines world-wide to focus on combating such
runway hazards, which by most measures are the first or second most
common type of commercial-air accident.
Over the years, Airbus experts have pegged runway overruns as
roughly one-third of all airliner accidents world-wide. Boeing's
statistics put the category somewhat lower in terms of percentage
of overall accidents, but the Chicago plane maker still estimates
overruns are responsible for roughly one out of five
commercial-plane crashes that end with substantial aircraft
damage.
Write to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 18, 2016 20:45 ET (00:45 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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