Advances in technology and aviation industry safety initiatives have significantly reduced commercial air transport accidents, but runway safety–related events generally, and runway excursions specifically, persist. Accurately assessing runway surface condition and braking capability have not received the same technological focus as contributing factors in other types of accidents. This article presents progress to date on an on-board system in development that would intercept flight data parameters for real-time analysis early in the landing roll, reference stored data representing the specific airplane’s known landing performance and apply an algorithm that helps the flight crew to objectively recognize the actual runway condition and to accurately assess their airplane’s braking capability.
Potential delivery modes for this information include near–real time “data push” integration into flight operations/dispatcher flight following tools, existing landing analysis syste…
