Honeywell Has a New Urban Air Mobility Lab. Why Does Its Avionics Research Matter for UAM?

Summary: Honeywell unveiled its cutting-edge urban air mobility research facility for a closed media tour. MarketScale had the pleasure of exploring the company’s new technologies to better understand how they’re setting a standard for UAM’s avionics needs. The main solutions on display and detailed in this report include its Simplified Vehicle Operations controls interface, its Detect and Avoid Radar solution, and its small form-factor fly-by-wire digital computer.

Table of Contents

1. A Brief Honeywell Avionics History Lesson
2. Simplified Vehicle Operations
3. Detect and Avoid Radar
4. Compact Fly-By-Wire System
5. How Will Honeywell Stand Out in a Crowded Field?
6. How Can Honeywell Strategically Bring These Technologies to Market?

Nestled into arid Phoenix, Arizona, deep in the stretches of its business parks, sits Honeywell Aersospace, the aircraft engines and avionics division of Honeywell International and just one of the many arms of the multinational manufacturing and business solutions conglomerate. The company at-large has a global footprint that touches a number of critical industries; from building management, to last mile software delivery solutions, to inorganic chemical compounds. Though, under its Phoenix roof is maybe the company’s most exciting, cutting-edge and future-focused research: developing new avionics solutions in urban air mobility.

MarketScale was invited to visit Honeywell’s new UAM lab for an exclusive media and analyst tour, one of the few times third-parties have laid eyes on Honeywell’s UAM work and the facilities enabling it. Both a showroom and an active research center, the UAM lab’s most current form was developed less than a year ago with the express purpose of assessing the most pressing trends and technologies shaping the future of air mobility.

“Even the whole lab here is meant not just for show and tell, but this is actually going to be a development where our lab engineers are going to be coming and actually working on the product,” said Sapan Shah, product lead for the UAS/UAM division at Honeywell Aerospace.

MarketScale’s media tour of Honeywell’s UAM lab, where it tests and develops new avionics solutions.

Why invest so heavily, with both solutions and an entire research wing, in this specific side of the aerospace industry? And why now? A vision for ‘flying cars’ has been an American staple as early as when traditional automobiles were still gaining mass acceptance. As air travel became a popular part of everyday society in the mid-20th century, and as 1960s-styled science fiction visualized a futuristic urban air network for consumers, the idea of realizing short-distance urban air travel suddenly felt less like a pipe dream for OEMs and private services. The back half of the 20th century saw several attempts at realizing this vision with helicopter air taxis, but everything from price barriers to fatal accidents tempered the energy behind UAM.

The hunger for UAM has been there, but the technology and policy ecosystem just hasn’t been able to support the industry. Today, the desire for UAM is increasingly defined by urban realities: a COVID-accelerated suburban sprawl coupled with a mass return to the office, more visible climate change in major metropolitan hubs, and the growing production of electric vehicles reigniting the imagination for cleaner and elevated transportation…pun intended. And finally, the technology needed to make UAM a reality is closer than ever to our collective imaginations.

“I think urban air mobility, the story is really a technology story, but it’s also a story about society and society at large,” said Daniel Newman, principal analyst and founding partner at Futurum Research and one of the guests at Honeywell’s UAM lab unveiling.

“And so the idea of being able to move people more efficiently is a story that probably isn’t being talked about enough because we tend to like to focus on the tech, and as a tech analyst, I love to focus on the tech. But I think in the end, it’s going to be about how do we really improve people’s lives? How do we improve society, drive more productivity and of course create a stronger economy?”

This societal craving for bringing the world into ‘the future,’ as well as the potential for reaping massive profits in an untapped market, has finally culminated in the urban air mobility research we see today. Led by commercial drone usage and the development of vertical takeoff and lift aircrafts, UAM as a formal industry is now categorized by the FAA as a “safe and efficient aviation transportation system that will use highly automated aircraft that will operate and transport passengers or cargo at lower altitudes within urban and suburban areas.”

Bringing this aerospace sub-industry from concept to reality takes not just new vehicles and new regulations, but an entire ecosystem of technologies that will manage autonomous flight, collision detection, and vehicle operations. A full suite of avionics for an emerging industry is Honeywell’s bread and butter and it’s where Honeywell is most needed in supporting UAM growth.

From the First Autopilot to Supporting Autonomous UAS

As Newman sees it, bringing in media for a lab tour was as much a marketing endeavor for Honeywell’s new research as it was a desire to recontextualize Honeywell’s experience in avionics. Though it’s a point of pride for the international conglomerate, its avionics don’t always get the B2B pat-on-the-back they deserve, let alone the consumer recognition.

“A company like Honeywell that often is in the background, they are making a ton of meaningful contributions to the aerospace industry, one of the leaders in the space, but not always recognized. We recognize the carriers, we recognize the jet makers,” he said.

Jia Xu, CTO and Senior Director of UAM/UAS at Honeywell Aeroscape, giving a presentation on Honeywell’s new avionics.

Honeywell’s history in avionics is robust; the company first entered the commercial space in the mid-1950s, and was developing avionics for military aircrafts as early as World War II. Its milestone achievements include inventing cabin pressurization, the autopilot control system, ground proximity sensors, and featuring their display and engine controls on the Apollo 11 rocket. It’s that history of avionics innovation, success and imagination that gives Honeywell the pedigree to tackle UAM solutions.

“When we talk to customers, we’re not only saying, yes, we can solve that particular problem, but we’re not just going to give you something and you’ve got to figure out how to integrate this in your system. Because Honeywell has such a long legacy of developing all these products, both mechanical, electrical, propulsion, we have the ability to not just say, here’s a piece, but here’s the whole puzzle that piece goes into,” said Monta Fowlkes, senior business director for UAM/UAS at Honeywell Aerospace.

Honeywell launched its UAM division during peak COVID-19 in June of 2020, and from the start, identified its role as leveraging the “power of our engineering resources and know-how to transform urban air taxis, drone delivery of parcels and all forms of autonomous flight.”

The high-level challenges still in front of fully-realized UAM deployment are numerous, but Honeywell’s focus in launching its UAM division and lab lands on three main factors: creating technology that removes risk, creating smaller avionics solutions, and collaborating on needed policy.

“As much as we want to make sure we continue to up-skill the human workforce, keep people involved, pilots take on a lot of risk and flying has become more and more autonomous. But in in the most dangerous situations, policy is going to really matter because you can train in a simulator your entire life as a pilot, but that first time you lose an engine or that first time that a bird flies in and it causes a major disruption, how ready are you really for these situations,” Newman said.

“You want to be able to take what you have in a much larger aircraft and be able to put it in something that’s more of a personal size, but also have it in a way that it’s affordable,” Fowlkes said.

Though UAM is its own sub-industry of the larger aerospace industry, it itself has specific core segments that are shaping use case and technology research: urban air taxis, middle-mile cargo, and last-mile delivery. At Honeywell, the aim is to meet the needs of every segment with one focused research and development campaign.

“We’re able to address several different markets and a lot of cases with the same types of solutions,” Fowlkes said.

The drone space is Honeywell’s first priority, considering the complexity of the systems needed to maneuver drones is much simpler, lowering the barrier to entry for both tech-validating use cases and new regulation to manage a growing network.

The vehicle size required for middle-mile cargo is a good transition point for Honeywell’s research to go from the smallest of form factors to some of the largest in UAM. Not for nothing, the public perception around larger vehicles flying over crowded urban environments is mixed. Surveys show that while consumer support for UAM is strong, even stronger is their concern for the safety of civilians on the ground. Again, this makes drones and middle-mile cargo a more attractive first endeavor.

“From a safety perspective…people would be much more comfortable with autonomous cargo vehicles flying around versus something with urban taxi that actually has people in it,” Fowlkes said.

In the air taxi space, Honeywell boasts important partnerships with the OEMs developing popular VTOL prototypes, like Pipistrel, Lilium, and Textron. Though middle- and last-mile research is more immediately applicable, Honeywell’s product development is all leading towards enabling the ‘flying car’ future we’ve imagined for decades.

While touring the lab, MarketScale had a chance to sit down with various team leads to dig deeper on the specific technologies Honeywell is bringing to market. As we’ll explore below, each solution is solving its own challenge in UAM while also integrating with a larger ecosystem of avionics. It’s Honeywell’s speciality, and the results of its research are already exciting.

“We see ourselves as enablers,” Fowlkes said.

Simplified Vehicle Operations

What Is It?

When you first enter Honeywell’s UAM lab, it’s hard to miss the massive space shuttle-looking cockpit in the middle of the facility. Thinking it’s the main attraction, you might take a seat and admire the reflective surfaces and the modern form factor. Honeywell’s new technology of note, though, isn’t the sleek cockpit itself but the bells and whistles on board, the avionics powering an upgraded and simplified dashboard experience.

Known as Simplified Vehicle Operations, or SVO for short, this Honeywell solution is working to drastically simplify and improve the entire array of flight controls and instrument panels, from screens and meters to gauges and lights, that make up today’s modern cockpit. Airspeed, heading, vertical speed indicators, turn coordinators, attitude and altitude meters, and the yoke make up just a few of the basic instruments that define aircraft piloting; Honeywell believes all these controls, and the dynamics between them, are up for innovation and improvement.

“Essentially what we do is we take the pilot and deconstruct the pilot into a lot of different functionalities,” Shah said.

Even as the digital transformation of the cockpit has already simplified and replaced a lot of the old physical gauges with digital meters and systems, the intricate relationships between each indicator can take hundreds if not thousands of hours to fully grasp.

“One of the examples people like to use a lot is the idea between an automatic transmission and a manual transmission…. You get behind an automatic, now I can drink my soda while I’m driving,” said Fowlkes. “So it doesn’t take very long before you say, ‘I see the advantage to this.’ Anytime you’re reducing complexity and making it more intuitive, I think it’s natural for people to say yes.'”

As an alternative to the traditional suite of avionics, Honeywell’s SVO condenses cockpit controls down to a set of touchscreens and an inceptor. Leveraging a full suite of solutions from Honeywell’s detect and avoid radar to its fly-by-wire computing system (both of which we’ll explore in depth below), the new dashboard aims to introduce a higher level of autonomy, ease of use, and visual intuitiveness to piloting.

Honeywell’s demo simplified vehicle operations cockpit.

Whereas before, a pilot might use a rather cluttered and convoluted waypoint navigator to guide their minute-to-minute decisions and stay on course, with SVO the pilot would reference a 3D-rendered environment of their flight path, reflecting geographic terrain, landmarks and even roadways. Honeywell’s vision was to look to consumer electronics for visual inspiration, which have been perfecting simple navigation interfaces for years now. In bringing that ease of use to the cockpit, it would ideally remove confusion and minimize human error while in the air. The entire experience was reminiscent of plugging in an address over CarPlay, with a touchscreen, sleek GUI and all.

“You no longer have cryptic waypoints; you have road names. So if you are an operator flying in Phoenix every day, you look at this and you know exactly what these are, and you look down and you know where you are. So you’ve got that situational awareness,” Shah said.

Like playing a Quidditch mission in a Harry Potter video game, or following your route on Google Maps, pilots would have an almost gamified guide highlighting their path from point A to point B. Add on top of that a layer of automation that keeps the vehicle to a strict altitude and heading, piloting an SVO-powered plane would make it much easier to keep to a pre-determined flight plan.

“The other innovative thing that we’re addressing is essentially to have the skylane or highlane…just like when you’re on the road and you have the white and yellow lines, I think that just provides a lot of situational awareness of where you are, how fast you’re moving, where the other vehicles are,” Shah said.

A simulation flight for Honeywell’s simplified vehicle operations. Credit: Honeywell Aerospace.

Most, if not all, commercial airliners today have robust and capable autopilot functionality that can balance the relationships between each flight control. It manages cockpit workload and usually performs tasks more quickly and efficiently than the average pilot. However, two areas are still prime for autopilot improvement:

1. Smaller aircrafts, from private single-seat aircrafts to 20-seat jets, still don’t have a standard autopilot solution.
2. Existing autopilot functionality still requires constant monitoring and cross-checking from pilots.

The vision for Honeywell’s SVO is to solve both of those challenges, making autonomous functionality simpler, more responsive and less manned. Honeywell still has a lot of work to do before said autopilot technology can can claim to be “fully autonomous” and the FAA will likely still require pilot redundancy for vehicles carrying passengers. Autopilot, for the foreseeable future, will need the watchful eye of a pilot. However, getting its functionality to a point where it’s confidently a more present part of minute-to-minute UAM piloting will naturally bring down possibilities for human error, and if Honeywell sticks to its standards, it would be a major upgrade to the capabilities of traditional autopilot systems.

“The autopilot is always on. You never turn off the autopilot…which is very different from today’s vehicle, where there’s a lot of mode confusion, and that causes accident. Is the autopilot on or not? Do you know what is on and not on?…. If you look at the accident reasons, those are some of the reasons for that. And what we have created here is that you can fly a vehicle coupled to a flight plan,” Shah said.

Clear yet simplified indicators and a road-based GPS navigation system would make for a familiar experience behind the yoke. Though this is being developed for less-intensive piloting operations like air taxi-style vehicles, the idea is still to scale the solution for commercial flights. To prepare for that long-term adoption, Honeywell is building flexibility into the pilot-automation balance. Essentially, pilots can choose which features to couple with the pre-determined flight plan and which to manually control. There are some guaranteed limitations, though; for VTOLs at least, the automation features would include safety boundaries. For example, pilots won’t be able to do a barrel roll and flip the vehicle upside down, no matter how hard they crank the inceptor.

Pilots will still want manual functionality, though. What if there’s an unprecedented obstacle suddenly in the way of your aircraft, right along the pre-determined flight path? Shah and his team are working to solve this with SVO, too. Whether it’s a manual override from the pilot, a new flight path from an independent operations control center or a more formalized ATC-style network of oversight, SVO would allow for in-flight redirection without losing automated functionality.

“Let’s say President Biden is in the area unannounced, and now there’s airspace restriction…or there’s a law enforcement helicopter, and you can’t go there. There will be a lot of reasons where there is an airspace restriction suddenly. So yes, you will get an uploaded flight plan and new flight plan where you say, ‘you have received a new flight plan, activate.’ All you have to do is press activate and you don’t need to fly around it…that new flight plan becomes your primary flight plan,” Shah said.

Why Research It?

Honeywell chose the goal of innovating critical aircraft controls as a key research focus due to an intersection of important trends shaping the growing UAM market:

1. a pressing pilot shortage, exacerbated by the pandemic and the macroeconomic environment
2. a growing interest across the world to develop a network of VTOL aircrafts, and the corresponding infrastructure, for urban air travel
3. a desire to capture VTOL market share pushing aircraft manufacturers to more heavily invest in research and development of UAM solutions

“If you look at all the OEMs that are talking about the operations of the next five years, they’re all looking at ramping up to thousands of vehicles very quickly…because there’s definitely demand out there. And in general, for every aircraft, you need about three to five pilots. So if you’re looking at 5,000 vehicles, that’s about 15,000 to 25,000 pilots. And we already had a pilot shortage pre-COVID,” Shah said.

Training pilots is already a massive undertaking. The FAA currently requires a varying minimum of training hours depending on what kind of piloting you’re preparing for. A recreational pilot only needs 30 hours to get certified. A commercial pilot needs closer to 250 hours or so. Airline pilots need as much as 1,500 hours of training before they can get in the cockpit. The current pilot shortage is already putting pressure on these requirements, and they’re likely to face further critique as the UAM market begins to take off.

It’s still not decided which pilot license would cover a standardized set of vehicles like air taxis, but regardless, the possible scope of training investment to launch a nationwide VTOL network is seen as too inhibitive by industry players, from airlines to Honeywell.

“How do you get somebody 1,200 hours, because that’s what’s required by FAA in order for you to actually fly? Now you need 20,000 pilots with 1,200 hours. And it takes two to three years for somebody to get there. That’s a tremendous amount of training, cost, work associated to make the ecosystem work,” Shah said.

By introducing robust automation, Shah imagines a world where operational energy, and therefore training, is cut down considerably for pilots. If pilots are now focusing their training on situational awareness, contingency management and strategic critical thinking, rather than the nuances of complicated control relationships or the manual operations that come with those nuances, would a pilot still need that level of training? Shah says no, detailing a future where pilot training can be cut down by as much as 80%.

“By providing technology and automation, now you’re changing a two-year cycle into a six-month cycle,” he said.