BA Boeing Co

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 Boeing 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)

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