Enabling Aviation Safety In and Off the Skies

In this episode of Aerospace Unplugged, we tackle 2025's top aviation safety issues: rising close calls on runways and the growing threat of GPS jamming and spoofing.

Our host, Adam Kress chats with Priya Poyil, a Director of Offering Management at Honeywell Aerospace Technologies, about aviation safety and industry efforts to tackle key challenges in this insightful discussion.

Transcript

INTRODUCTION TO PODCAST

Adam Kress (0:43)

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Aerospace Unplugged. I'm your host, Adam Kress. On today's episode, we'll be talking about aviation safety, and in particular, two hot topics for 2025 that have been making headlines. The first, runway safety.

 As the skies get more crowded than ever before, traffic on the ground is growing as well. We're seeing a growing number of close calls and near misses on US runways, and in fact, just before the end of last year at LAX in Los Angeles, a plane carrying a college basketball team nearly cut across a runway where a Delta flight was taking off. It was all caught on a live stream video, and of course, the FAA is now investigating.

The second safety topic we'll cover today is jamming and spoofing. This is where the GPS signals used by aircraft are being maliciously disrupted by bad actors. In areas of the world affected by war, this has been a growing threat that the airline industry has been forced to face.

Adam Kress (1:47)

Joining us today to talk safety on the podcast is Priya Poyil, a director of offering management at Honeywell Aerospace Technologies. Priya has been with Honeywell for more than 12 years, and in her current role, works very closely with Honeywell's runway safety offerings. So Priya, welcome into the podcast.

Priya Poyil (02:05)

Thank you so much, Adam, for having me here.
 
 
 
 INTRODUCTION & STATE OF AVIATION SAFETY TODAY

Adam Kress (02:07)

All right, let's dive into it. So first off, tell me a little bit about your background, how you came to aviation, and then how you ended up at Honeywell.

Priya Poyil (02:15):

I actually joined Honeywell 12 years back, as you just mentioned. I came from a very unrelated industry. I used to work with power boilers and industrial heating, and joined the competitive intelligence team in Honeywell. It's a very fascinating industry, as you would know, in terms of the nuances of the industry, how technology works for this everyday life of us. Even for someone like me who did not have an aviation background, it's something that you can easily relate to because all of us fly, and then you get to see how these technologies are used for your everyday problem-solving. Some of these solutions, for these problems, these solutions doesn't exist and some of them does, but then you have to make it work for a wide variety of markets that we cater to like air transport, business jets, defense. So yeah, that's how I ended up here.

Adam Kress (03:04):

Yeah, I'm with you. I've been here a little over seven years and did not have an aerospace background at all, but as I'm sure you've discovered, you fall in love with it very quickly and just absorb all the information and knowledge, so it's been fun. So tell me a little bit about your current role and what you're focused on, on the day to day.

Priya Poyil (03:27):

I currently lead the traffic and surveillance products within the avionics side of the business. That means that we do have a great legacy on introducing technologies, introducing products that improves the safety of flight, like the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System. EGPWS is a Honeywell invention to the field. Today, I focus more on building newer technologies on those offerings for solving the newer problems in the market, like just you mentioned, the newer number of incidents that we are hearing of almost collision incidents in the runway, or the GPS interferences across the globe. All these are the newer problems requiring newer solutions, so I focus mostly in bringing those to the market quickly.

IMPACT OF AIRPORT INFRASTRUCTURE

Adam Kress (06:34)

Okay. So what factors are contributing to the increase in these close calls that we're seeing, and what can the industry do to address them?

Priya Poyil (06:41):

There is a lot of reasons as to why we see this more often now than we have seen it previously, Adam. We rely very heavily on infrastructure and the ground traffic controllers to let our pilots know today, in terms of a lot of... This is a very high workload, high pressure situation, and as you know, not all of our airports are equipped to the same level of safety, not all of them have the same level of infrastructure. And now, you add to it issues like fatigue, shortage of staff, miscommunication between pilots, your scenarios, there's a lot of reasons why this has become suddenly very rampant, but it is very concerning right.

Now, FAA, and in general, all of us are putting in investments to improve the ground infrastructure as we should do. There's about 332 million of grant as the Airport Infrastructure Grant. It's supposed to enhance the safety and add better terminals and it's just not all focused on runway safety, but overall, the intent is to improve the safety of our airports. But in addition, we should also focus on how do we bring in technology that directly alerts our pilots? Now, the pilots are the last line of defense, the most important player in this equation who finally has to take that decision. The action lies on him or her to make that final call, and today, he or she's very dependent on the ground traffic controller letting them know as to what needs to be done. To get that alerting, get that awareness into the pilot, that piece is what is missing in today's equation and where we are focusing on.

CRITICAL NEED OF COMMUNICATION & AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL’S ROLE

Adam Kress (08:12):

Okay, excellent. So we know that effective communication is critical, especially between air traffic control and pilots. Can you provide some background on how this happens now? Literally, when the pilot is navigating the ground, what he or she is hearing from air traffic control, and how that could potentially change?

Priya Poyil (08:31):

In an ideal world, Adam, there would not be as many aircrafts which are lined up in queue to take off. There would not be as many aircrafts in the air trying to land. There would be enough time for all of us to take it slowly, but with the current air transport density and the number of how busy our airports are, as we can see, this is not as easy as we say, right. Even if you have really crisp communication between the ATC and the pilot, there is always a latency which creeps in. Now consider the scenario. The air traffic controller has to first see the traffic on the runway. He or she has to then pass over that information to the pilot. The pilot has to acknowledge that information being passed and then take an action to either cancel the takeoff or abort the landing.

 In extremely clear communication, there is still latency which creeps in any of this. Now, with having a direct alerting technology which can go to the pilot directly, you are giving him or her an additional few seconds, and that sometimes is the difference between an actual catastrophic incidence versus having life saved and seconds to spare, so it's amazing to see that.

Adam Kress (09:38):

Yeah, it seems like with this rise in close calls and near misses, some of it is just the reality of there are literally more planes than ever before flying through the skies. There are more planes than ever before that have to taxi and navigate all the runways. I would imagine there's more airports in operation than there's ever been before and more being built, so it's inevitable, I guess just from a math perspective, that there's going to be more chances for something unfortunate to happen. So you mentioned the in-cockpits alerting systems, and I know that's something Honeywell has had a focus on. Take me through how that works and ideally how a pilot would use it.

Priya Poyil (10:22):

What Honeywell is working on is this, we call it a SURF-A, Surface Alerts, wherein we are letting the pilot have a direct alerting in the cockpit in addition to everything that the ground control infrastructure, operation, modernization, better equipment, better ATC communications, highly trained professionals, and keeping all of them as it should be. You are now giving the pilots a chance to know this information right in front of them and then have that decision to take in terms of... And that makes a whole lot of difference. Adam, when we have worked on a lot of models to simulate some of these accidents or near accidents which happened, and we could see that potentially there would be an additional 10 to 15 seconds that the pilot actually gets. Now, in layman terms, when somebody says 10 to 15 seconds, you would think, "What is 10 to 15 seconds going to do for this?"

But you hear the deafening silence between when a pilot actually gets alerted in the cockpit versus when an ATC communication actually happens, when he or she's being told by the ATC. That 15 seconds is like nerve-racking. You know that if they knew ahead, they could have not increased the speed. And it's also partially because when you are trying to cancel a takeoff, doing it at a speed when you're slow and when you're rolling on is different from canceling it when you're at a really high speed, so that 10 seconds for a pilot is crucial ship. It may not look much to us, but it is crucial for them.

Adam Kress (11:49):

Yeah. So the reality as it stands right now, because the Surface Alert, SURF-A technology that Honeywell is working to certify at the moment, it's not on the market yet. But right now, if an aircraft is coming in on approach and it does not realize that there is a plane in front of it on the runway or on a taxiway that intersects the runway, they are fully dependent on air traffic control to alert them.

Priya Poyil (12:12)

Yes, they are completely dependent on... You add to it a situation like it's bad weather, right?

Adam Kress (12:17):

Sure.

Priya Poyil (12:18):

You don't see, it's dark, it's night conditions. It's very common or it's very usual to have those mistakes made, and to have that alerting technology, and it's just not a visual alerting. You're going to have an oral cockpit alert which forces you to notice that there is traffic on runway. Someone's going to tell you, "Traffic on runway," so you're going to notice it, and these are happening at a time, when as a pilot, this is your most crucial workload environment. You're taxiing or either landing and takeoff is the most engaging time for a pilot, and at that point of time, there's a third set of eyes, that's what we want to call this as, someone else who's looking out for you in addition to ATC and yourself. It helps, and that's what we want to bring to the market sooner.

Adam Kress (12:58):

And like you said, the reality is that the pilot is going to be the last person capable of making a decision that could make the ultimate difference, so to get that oral and visual alert in the cockpit, you could not miss it, right?

Priya Poyil (13:14):

Yes, and it's not enough. Obviously, there is technologies that you could do in terms of forward-looking, newer aircraft which are getting built, but when you speak about safety, it is not just for the newer aircraft. You need to look at safety as something which is for everyday passengers. You've got 20,000 plus aircraft flying in the field. It has to work for everyone, so you need to find a way to balance the technology in such a way that it's easily adaptable, it's easily implementable to the markets that we have today which me and you fly every day, we need those aircraft equipped with those technologies.

INDUSTRY EFFORTS TO ADDRESS SAFETY CHALLENGES

Adam Kress (13:50):

Yeah. I know Honeywell has been in the process of testing this on its own aircraft and doing demonstration flights for potential customers. What has been the reaction from airlines and pilots who have witnessed this technology working?

Priya Poyil (14:05):

Yes, so we did have a whole lot of interest from... So we flew regulatory bodies, we flew airline pilots, we flew customers, so it was across the bodies, across the different people we flew. All of them were amazed at how crisp that communication is and how it's not easy to miss now in a cockpit, and a lot of these demo scenarios that we had, we did not have good visibility. So it was actually very, very enriching to see that we couldn't see the traffic on runway, even though you knew, because this is a demo scenario, you knew that there is an aircraft on the runway, you still couldn't spot it. But in your cockpit, you have an alert which is telling you that there is traffic on runway, and that makes... So we had very excited feedback from the market. All of them want to bring this to the market quicker, and as I was just mentioning, and it has to work for everybody. It has to work for the newer airports and the newer markets, the newer aircraft, but also for the existing older airports, existing aircraft which are flying today.

Adam Kress (17:16):

Okay. So when the pilots in the cockpit and SURF-A sends an alert, what is actually happening? How does SURF-A, quote unquote, "see" the plane down on the runway?

Priya Poyil (17:27):

So, we use our ADS-B technology and the traffic information and fuse it with the ground proximity warning system, EGPWS, on our aircraft already. So that information is then getting used by EGPWS to give you an oral alert in the cockpit saying that there is traffic on runway, so it's multiple equipment, multiple products which are already on your aircraft talking to each other that till date we're not talking to each other. So what basically SURF-A, the beauty of the system is that we are not adding newer boxes. We are not really bringing in a whole lot of new equipment on your existing aircraft, but what you have, we can upgrade them so that they talk to each other and then they get that information to you as a visual and oral alert.

Adam Kress (18:34):

Okay. I want to shift gears a little bit now and talk about a different safety issue that has started to face aviation really in the past year or two, and that's jamming and spoofing and the rise of GPS denied environments. So can you explain to the audience a little bit what I'm talking about with jamming, the difference between jamming and spoofing, and blocking these signals that allow pilots to literally know where their plane is at in the sky?

Priya Poyil (18:59):

Yes. So the GPS interference, as the term is now widely used, is a very common phenomenon now in the Europe, Middle East, Mediterranean regions. There are two different scenarios. As you rightly mentioned, there is GPS jamming and there is spoofing. In jamming, you're completely losing your GPS signal. It's entirely getting blocked or lost, and your navigation systems on board knows that, right? It's just like you have your cell with you and you lose your signal and it's just completely gone. You know that it's lost. You are aware that it's lost.

In spoofing, what you have is a stronger GPS signal which overpowers your true GPS signals and fakes it to be the right position, so the system does not necessarily realize that it is getting spoofed or that you're on an erroneous path, which is more dangerous than jamming. And both have impacts on your operations as you can imagine. You will lose your navigation sensor information, you're losing your FMS position, your aircraft start unintended paths that they're taking. At times, you hear a lot of spurious alerts, as we call it, in terms of in the cockpit, you'll hear warnings on terrain alerts when you are not supposed to because you're flying at a cruise that you're not supposed to hear these, and these all create a lot of confusion to the pilots.

This impacts the operational safety of an airline, and all of us are aware of it, including airlines themselves. OEMs, suppliers, avionics suppliers like Honeywell, regulatory bodies like EASA, all of us are working together to find more short-term mitigation efforts as well as long-term efforts for this.

Adam Kress (20:44):

Yeah. And this is primarily, the rise in this has coincided with the wars and other conflicts that are taking place in the world, so there's hot spots where this seems to occur more?

Priya Poyil (20:55):

Yes. So it's mostly the Nordic and the Baltic regions and the Mediterranean and the Middle Eastern regions. These are conflict zones, and the attack or the intent is not to disrupt commercial aviation. The intent is for sometimes these are state-sponsored themselves. They are trying to protect and defend their own space from enemy attacks or military operations, and commercial civil operations becomes a collateral damage. And it becomes harder to shut these down because it's not like you have one nefarious element who's trying to jam and spoof and you go find that entity and shut it down. You just can't do it, so we need to find ways to mitigate it knowing that these are areas that you will face these situations.

Adam Kress (21:35):

So what have airlines and operators done to combat this? How do they battle back? How do they change what they're doing?

Priya Poyil (21:43):

They are taking mitigation efforts, including having standard safety procedures, having their pilots trained more, and having awareness on the regions which are getting affected by these and not to be intimidated by the sudden spurious alerts. There's not taking away the fact, Adam, that this is extremely destructive to airlines. Even with all these, we did speak to a whole lot of airlines last year and some of them reported almost 500 instances in the last months. They just get used to flying in these environments, and that's a very dangerous strength.

You have safety information bulletins being released by EASA, released by aircraft OEM suppliers themselves, and suppliers like Honeywell who owns these products are trying to see, what can we do short term to mitigate these? And some of them are more long-term because you need to work around multiple systems. It's not impacting only one system in your aircraft. It impacts everything.

And then there are technologies, you have military technologies available today who we know how to fly in GPS-denied environments, but they're not commercially viable to put on every aircraft around. And that's what I was saying, that we have to find a way to make technology work for some of these segments that we operate in.

Adam Kress (23:03):

Does Honeywell have technological solutions that address the jamming and spoofing, or just other navigation aids?

Priya Poyil (23:15 – 23:36):

We are working towards multiple solutions today. Some of them are very specific, very short-term solutions which can quickly help you in identifying or detecting that you're getting spoofed, making sure that the EGPWS or the ground proximity warning systems reduces the false alerts or the spurious alerts that comes out in the cockpit. 

Priya Poyil (23:43):

So, yes, we are working with OEMs, regulatory bodies to find a way to solve this. This is not just a one supplier problem, as you can imagine. Its industries coming together to see, how can we address this together?

Adam Kress (23:58):

Is there any reason to expect that this becomes more of a hazard in the US?

Priya Poyil (24:04):

Hopefully not.

Adam Kress (24:06):

Sure.

Priya Poyil (24:07):

Again, the regions that we are seeing today are mostly very active conflict zones. If you do have one element, one nefarious element around your airport, it doesn't take much to go and do this jamming and spoofing yourself in terms of... But that's easier to shut down. If that's just one element that you know how to identify and track them, you can go and shut it down faster. But when you have a wide area, and these are not small spots, it's miles and miles of flying that you're getting spoofed or jammed. So hopefully, we don't see this much from the US domestic operators, but those aircraft which fly out of the country and have to go through any of these areas would have faced a similar issue.

Adam Kress (24:48):

Okay. On the topic of safety, you mentioned a few Honeywell products and its legacy a little bit in safety. Can you talk a little bit more about that? You touched on EGPWS, the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System, which is a really notable invention. Could you just explain that a little bit more?

Priya Poyil (25:09):

I am very humble to work with people who are very smart, very driven, very passionate about aviation safety in general. We have a legacy of working on solutions which addresses the safety of flight. EGPWS is the prominent one of them, right? Don Bateman. We just actually celebrated the 50th anniversary of EGPWS. FAA mandated it in 1974, and then we worked on it to enhance it further to have EGPWS, which is the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System, which again, Don led. And now, we have a whole lot of my engineering team who are not just Honeywell engineering team, they're industry veterans. They're very acknowledged technology professionals, all of them trying to bring in safety to the market sooner.

So though we spoke about SURF-A, SURF-A is just one of the runway safety products that we have. We have a whole lot of applications, a whole lot of functions, a whole lot of solutions on addressing runway excursions, wrong safety operations, in terms of you're trying to land on a taxiway instead of a runway. Now, these are all runway safety enhancements. Some of them are available today that you can actually adopt in your aircrafts. A lot of them are flying with these solutions already, and some of them are in works, like SURF-A, very excited.

FUTURE OUTLOOK ON AVIATION SAFETY ADVANCEMENTS

Adam Kress (26:29):

Yes, definitely. So in your job as an offering manager, I know that part of the balance you have to have is, "Well, we have incredible safety innovations. From an engineering perspective, we can create these amazing things." But then on the other hand, it's like, "Well, we have to sell it. Do we have buyers for it? Is there a market?" So how do you balance the technological innovation versus creating a product that a customer will want?

Priya Poyil (26:59):

So I have a very interesting job, because I work with extremely smart professionals. For them, we use the word innovation ideation. For them, it's their day-to-day job. They do it as part of their everyday. They come up with brilliant ideas, and my job, or rather, I focus mostly on taking those technologies or ideas and converting them into products or solutions that solves a specific problem in the market, that there is a specific segment of customer who values it, and finding that match.

So that's most exciting about my role, because every day, they come up with really great innovative solutions, so my job is really to bring those solutions faster to market in a way that our customers can adopt them quickly. And when I say that, it means more in terms of it cannot be very disruptive to their current operations. I cannot go and sell something which says that, "Oh, you need to ground your aircraft for the next two months or do very expensive upgrades on them, and then you will have the solution." So it's working that balance of how do you get extremely niche, extremely good technologies into a technology, into a solution which specifically targets the problem? Like, "I know you have this problem, I know you want this," and then you don't have to do the selling. It becomes more of, "When do you get it? When can I buy?"

Adam Kress (28:24):

Yeah.

Priya Poyil (28:25):

And that's what we heard mostly from our demos that we did with SURF-A as well. Every single customer that I spoke to was more and more in terms of, "How quickly can you get this to us?" And that's what we're working on.

Adam Kress (28:35):

Yeah, that's a good problem to have, right? The demand is so high, it's just, "When do I get it? When do I get it?" Does the flip side ever occur though where a potential customer is asking for something that's maybe just impossible?

Priya Poyil (28:48):

Oh, that's an interesting problem statement to work on. I think when you go and tell our set of technology professionals that you have this problem statement that you're coming from customers, you should see the excitement with them, right?

Adam Kress (29:02):

Yeah.

Priya Poyil (29:03):

So we obviously, from a pure technology perspective, there are millions and zillions of things that you could do. It is finding that balance of how do you make it commercially viable? How do you make it work for the customer who's asked it? I love my job because it is addressing the problem statements of the customer. Half of the technology part of it, honestly, I do not understand myself, Adam, but I get excited by knowing that this solves this problem and this is something that would help someone to figure this solution, and then I don't have to do the selling. It's value.

Adam Kress (29:35):

Yeah. SURF-A is the perfect example of that. Anyone out there who's ever flown down an airplane knows that you don't want any traffic on the runway in front of you as you're landing. It seems like something so simple, but again, with more flights and more traffic than ever before, it's a definite problem to solve.

PODCAST CLOSING

Adam Kress (29:53)

Well, Priya, I want to thank you so much for having you on today. I have one more question. We call the podcast Aerospace Unplugged, so when you unplug and have some free time, what do you like to do?

Priya Poyil (30:04):

I have a fourteen-year-old daughter, and I think teenage now starts earlier, like seven or eight.

Adam Kress (30:13):

Your fourteen-year-old has been a teenager for about four years.

Priya Poyil (30:18):

I try to spend as much time as I can with her. So we both read a lot of books, so we scour the bookshops and pick up books. And I do have actually a new year’s resolution this year that unless I'm finished reading the stock that I have, I'm not going to buy more.

Adam Kress (30:35):

Running out of room, right?

Priya Poyil (30:38):

We'll see how long I stick to it, but yes.

Adam Kress (30:40 – 31:03):

Yes. Yeah, that's good. It's still January as we're recording, so you've made it this far. All right. Well, thank you again, Priya, and as always, thank you to our listeners out there as well. Make sure you check out Honeywell's website for much more information on all the safety technologies we offer in the aviation sector, and of course, more episodes of Aerospace Unplugged. Thank you for listening, and we'll catch you again on the next episode of Aerospace Unplugged.