Good News for Anxious Fliers: Improved Runway Safety

Enabling existing technology helps pilots during key flight phases

the underside of an airplane with a blue outline

In-flight technology could make taxiing, takeoff and landing safer.

AARP (Getty Images)

Berit Thorkelson,

AARP

En español

Published July 07, 2025

Runway safety software helps pilots in the same way that advanced driver-assistance systems, which include features such as blind spot and collision warnings, help motorists.

In June, Southwest Airlines, which operates the largest number of Boeing 737 airplanes of any airline, activated software in its entire 737 fleet that increases flight crew situational awareness during taxiing, takeoff and landing.

The technology gives pilots text and verbal alerts during those key moments, whether they’re moving too fast, flying too high or headed toward the wrong runway.

“It’s like having a third pilot in the cockpit,” says David Cohen, commercial pilot, flight instructor and dean for the College of Aeronautics at Lynn University.

“It’s significant to see such a big player adopt the technology,” says Ryan Ewing, founder of AirlineGeeks, an industry news site, and a holder of an MBA in air transportation management. “What usually happens in the airline industry is one big carrier will adopt something like this, and then the rest will adopt it too.”

That’s welcome news to fliers, especially with increased aviation accidents and close calls in the news. .

Last December, a Los Angeles International Airport air traffic controller stopped a charter jet from landing on the runway where a Delta flight was taking off. In March in Orlando, Florida, a Southwest flight nearly took off from a taxiway instead of a runway. An air traffic controller intervened.

And January’s midair collision near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport between an American Airlines commercial plane and an Army helicopter killed 67 people, making it the deadliest U.S. air disaster since 2001.

AARP’s 2025 Travel Trends survey found that airplanes were the most popular form of transportation for those 50 and older. It’s also worth noting that an estimated 25 million adults have travel anxiety. The technology is already available on planes — Southwest’s fleet as well as other Boeing and Airbus aircraft — and needs only to be enabled. Southwest began activating the technology on its airplanes in late March and by mid-June had completed the process in more than 700 aircraft — nearly 90 percent of its fleet.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recognized the broader benefit of the runway alerts back in 2000, when it recommended that the Federal Aviation Administration require it. And in 2018, the NTSB found that Honeywell’s technology, specifically, would likely have prevented a runway near-miss at San Francisco Airport a year earlier. If the technology has long been available, why only now is it being enabled? “Unfortunately, I think, like everything else in business, it does come down to money. This is great technology, but it’s not free,” Cohen says.

A combination of factors likely tipped the scales toward adoption.

Ewing says that, as in many industries, the COVID-19 pandemic forced many people working for airlines to retire. “I think they are trying to add an extra layer [of safety] as a less-experienced workforce begins to enter the industry,” he says.

Those newer pilots are encountering increasingly crowded skies.

“The airspace is getting busier. And that’s not just in the U.S., it’s everywhere,” Cohen says. Add in decades-old infrastructure that will take time and money to update, he says, and an easy software enablement may start to make financial sense.

“It’s certainly a safety advantage. I think that’s number one,” Cohen says. “Southwest has probably done the math, and there’s an operational advantage as well.”

In a statement to AARP, the Air Line Pilots Association, International said they support “mandatory equipage of commercial aircraft with alerting systems that are currently available, some of them already installed, but not yet activated for use.”

Thea Feyereisen, a distinguished technical fellow at Honeywell Aerospace Technologies, which creates the alert system, says Alaska Airlines enabled the precursor to the system in 2008.

While Southwest is the biggest carrier to adopt the runway safety measures, it appears that other carriers will soon follow its lead, creating a new, though as-yet unofficial, airline safety standard that has the potential to prevent accidents and near misses. “We are in active discussions with several airlines. We expect at least one other airline to put this technology into service soon,” Feyereisen says, declining to name the carrier.

Although airline accidents make news, they are rare. Accidents decreased globally from 3.72 per million flights in 2005 to 1.13 in 2024, according to the International Air Transport Association, which calls this reduction “significant.”

According to a 2024 IATA safety report, when accidents do occur, it’s generally during takeoff and landing, which are the most complex phases of flying. Additionally, accidents are often preceded by an accumulation of failures. But if just one of these failures is caught in time, an accident can be averted.

It’s called the Swiss cheese model, commonly referenced in aviation, Ewing says. “All the holes have to line up for a major accident or incident to occur. And this technology that [Southwest and others are] adopting is inserting another layer … so the holes are less likely to line up.”

Widespread adoption of the technology has the potential to disrupt a negative chain of events during key times in a flight.“I think for the traveler, it’s maybe just another level of comfort,” Cohen says. “[Flying is] the safest mode of travel. ... I feel much safer in a plane, in the air, than I probably do on the Florida turnpike here in Central or South Florida, just because you’re in a system that was designed with safety completely in mind.”

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Berit Thorkelson is a travel writer and editor for aarp.org. She has also written for publications such as National Geographic Traveler, Better Homes & Gardens and The Minnesota Star-Tribune's travel section.

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