'Star Wars' tech to keep pilots airborne

The recent so-called "snowpocalypse" laid the north-east corner of America low and threw the festive travel plans of thousands of people into chaos because planes, trains and automobiles really couldn't go anywhere.

Take a look at this video called "Idiot with a Tripod" by film maker Jamie Stuart to show how it all looked on Boxing Day.

It has been estimated that the snow storms resulted in the cancellation of as many as 4,000 flights in and out of New York alone.

But one Fortune 100 company thinks that the devastation to flight schedules and travel plans needn't have been that bad if the technology they are developing had been in play.

Honeywell's Synthetic Enhanced Vision System has been described as something straight out of Star Wars that allows pilots to "see" even when true visibility is at zero.

"Pilots know how to fly an aircraft by looking out the window. It's the first thing they learn to do, but in bad weather or low visibility that isn't enough", said Chad Cundiff who is the vice president in charge of the SEVS project.

"What we can do with our technology is give a pilot a view of the world that is always clear and sunny regardless of what goes on outside his cockpit. We show a pilot what he really cares about like where is the runway, we show the airport, the terrain and mountains.

"We don't show clouds because obviously one of the benefits of the technology is to see through the clouds - to have it appear like a clear sunny day even when it is not. We can also show the energy, fuel being used, the state of the aircraft, how fast it is going and which direction they are heading to, if they have enough energy (fuel) to clear a particular mountain and where the aircraft is going to end up."
The system dubbed SEVS relies on a number of technologies including a rich 3D view of the world taken from a GPS database to real time images captured by infrared sensors that would show any planes or obstacles on the strip that otherwise couldn't be seen by looking out the cockpit window.

Mr Cundiff said Honeywell's "terrain database" is made up of data gathered over 800 million flight hours.

The biggest problem for most airports is low visibility. The Federal Aviation Authority reports that 55% of all flight delays are due to bad weather.

Generally speaking if an aircraft cannot see the runway at a height of 200ft, it will not be able or allowed to land. Mr Cundiff said Honeywell's system can lop at least 50ft off that limit.

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