Honeywell starts flight testing to bring autonomous landing capabilities to market

Hon­ey­well has begun in-flight test­ing using sen­sor tech­nol­o­gy that will help urban air mobil­i­ty (UAM) vehi­cles land with­out pilot inter­ven­tion.

Test­ing of these sen­sors will gath­er data and refine their capa­bil­i­ties to sup­port future autonomous land­ing capa­bil­i­ties. Data col­lec­tion was com­piled in Ari­zona using Honeywell’s AS350 heli­copter, and addi­tion­al test­ing is planned in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Honeywell’s part­ners.

Any air­craft involved will be out­fit­ted with Hon­ey­well sen­sors and include cam­eras that analyse visu­al mark­ings resem­bling QR codes, which help guide the vehi­cle to a des­ig­nat­ed land­ing spot.

This work will con­tin­ue for the rest of the year, with a demon­stra­tion of ful­ly auto­mat­ed land­ings set to be sched­uled with­in the next 12 months.

Matt Pic­chet­ti, Vice pres­i­dent and Gen­er­al man­ag­er, Nav­i­ga­tion and Sen­sors, at Hon­ey­well Aero­space, said: “Intro­duc­ing numer­ous pilot­ed and autonomous air­craft in dense urban envi­ron­ments is a real chal­lenge in mak­ing the urban air mobil­i­ty vision achiev­able.

“Nav­i­ga­tion is a key part of Honeywell’s her­itage, from the industry’s first autopi­lot to the oppor­tu­ni­ties we see today in urban air mobil­i­ty. We are draw­ing on this exper­tise and our prob­lem-solv­ing capa­bil­i­ties to lead the way in iden­ti­fy­ing and bring­ing to mar­ket the most effec­tive tech­nolo­gies to sup­port safer, and increas­ing­ly autonomous, urban air mobil­i­ty oper­a­tions.”

This mile­stone rep­re­sents impor­tant progress towards the goal of achiev­ing clean­er, safer and smarter air­craft. Hon­ey­well adds that this is a key first step for the future of flight, as it adds sen­sors which sup­port safer, autonomous urban air mobil­i­ty oper­a­tions.

As test­ing and data col­lec­tion move from proof-of-con­cept pro­to­types to real­i­ty, the com­pa­ny say there are many ben­e­fits to improv­ing nav­i­ga­tion and imple­ment­ing fea­tures such as auto­mat­ic land­ing.

With more auto­mat­ic fea­tures and process­es, pilot work­loads will ease and crit­i­cal manoeu­vres dur­ing intense phas­es of flight will become eas­i­er and safer.

Oper­a­tions may also ben­e­fit from the strate­gic use of autonomous land­ing, mak­ing vehi­cle through­put more pre­dictable and reduc­ing turn­around time. Pas­sen­gers ulti­mate­ly can ben­e­fit from the improved reli­a­bil­i­ty, safe­ty and com­fort of smoother autonomous land­ing prac­tices along with more reli­able trans­porta­tion sched­ules.

Hon­ey­well offers cer­ti­fi­ca­tion exper­tise as well as hard­ware and soft­ware tech­nolo­gies to sup­port the UAM space, includ­ing its next-gen­er­a­tion AHRS (atti­tude and head­ing ref­er­ence sys­tems), com­pact fly-by-wire sys­tem, RDR-84K radar and hybrid-elec­tric tur­bo gen­er­a­tors.