Honeywell Aerospace is omnipresent in the airline industry. As airplanes become more and more sophisticated and airlines are continuously looking at innovation to make the flying experience worthwhile for both the passenger and the crew, companies such as Honeywell Aerospace are up there, providing products and solutions for that experience and more. At India Aviation, Honeywell Aerospace was present in full strength showcasing products and solutions that would excite the Indian market further.

Aileen McDowall, Vice President, Airline Business, Europe, Middle East, Africa & India, said: “There is an environment for growth and airlines are constantly in new needs”. Honeywell is present in wheels & brakes; avionics and mechanical aspects of an aircraft. “There is not a single plane which does not have some product or solution of Honeywell,” she states emphatically.

Aileen McDowall mentioned that Honeywell has a wide portfolio of products and solutions – from selectable equipment to repair and overhaul upgrades to services. In selectable equipment she highlighted the IntuVue RDR 3D weather radar system which gives a three-dimensional, 180-degree display of weather from the ground up to 60,000 feet, out to 320 nautical miles ahead of the aircraft. It scans and stores the data to recreate a 3D image of storm cells, complemented by automatic ground returns extracted from Honeywell’s enhanced ground proximity warning systems (EGPWS).

In sync with tech-savvy times, Honeywell has come up with services on iPads for pilots after having gone through rigorous certification. The iPads help pilots in flight displays, flight management systems, etc. There are at least three levels of intense certification, but most airlines are stopping at Level 2, certified accordingly.

Sunny Kancharla said weather is a big concern for airlines in general and pilots in particular who need real time information to safely navigate the aircraft. Honeywell systems provides information on lightning, storms, etc. Predictive hail and lightening icons overlay the regular weather display, providing an increased level of awareness of hazardous conditions to the flight crew. He mentioned that predictive Jet Airways had selected Honeywell to provide maintenance services for auxiliary power units (APUs) on board its fleet of 10 Boeing 777 airplanes. The five-year agreement will help Jet Airways better predict and manage maintenance cycles, allowing the India-based airline to reduce unscheduled downtime and improve reliability of its fleets. Similarly SpiceJet is said to be contemplating on similar products and solutions.

Aileen McDowall said that Honeywell’s focus areas included (a) pilots (b) maintenance personnel and (c) passengers. For enhanced communication connectivity for the passengers from their seats on an airline, Honeywell is working on satellite communication solutions. It is already in discussions and that these when deployed would leapfrog.

Talking about Honeywell’s JetWave Ka-band broadband connectivity, she said that from the present Inmarsat’s Ku-band, Ka-band would be leapfrogging of technology, providing much more bandwidth. Inmarsat has applied for approval and should be getting it before the end of the year.

Honeywell’s JetWave satellite communications terminals enable global connectivity via Inmarsat Aviation’s Global Xpress Ka-band network. The hardware and network are optimised for mobility to provide a consistently outstanding passenger experience all over the world.

Sunny Kancharla said the Ku-band was 500 megahertz while Ka-band was 1,000 megahertz. In the older technology the bandwidth was 50 Mbps while now it would be 3,700 Mbps, thus providing unmatched connectivity. A survey conducted among airline passengers indicated that 80 per cent of the respondents wanted to have it.

With regard to Wi-Fi connectivity, he said, that on international airlines such as Emirates one could send text and other posts on an A380 and select Boeing 777 aircraft. One could make calls from ones mobile and using the Internet and also use in-seat satellite phone, but once in Indian airspace these services have to be turned off due to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) regulations, hoping that they would change soon.

Giving details of how Honeywell is transforming navigation systems, she highlighted SmartPath ground-based augmentation system (GBAS) which is a cost-effective precision navigation solution to increase airport capacity, decrease air traffic noise and reduce weather-related delays. It also reduces operating costs for both the aircraft operator and air navigation service providers (ANSP). By providing aircraft operators with very precise, high integrity digital navigation data, Honeywell’s SmartPath GBAS provides unparalleled flexibility to terminal operations that enables ANSPs to efficiently manage airspace in ways that were not possible with legacy instrument landing systems (ILS).

Sunny Kancharla said that with the deployment of GBAS, airports which have 35 to 40 operations on a runway can go up to 70. It is bringing down turnaround time of an aircraft on a runway from close to two minutes to less than a minute. It reduces waiting time, taxiing time.

They stated that Honeywell is deeply entrenched in India’s aviation sector development and was constantly engaging airlines and airports on new developments. The Airports Authority of India (AAI) is one such entity with whom Honeywell is in constant interaction, considering that AAI is planning creation of infrastructure at under-served and un-served airports.

For an enhanced passenger experience, Honeywell has installed solutions at many airports for quick turnaround of baggage and passenger throughput.