Honeywell Expands Flight Management System Guided Visuals Offering to Europe

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Honeywel announced it is expanding its Flight Management System (FMS) Guided Visuals offering into Europe to equip pilots with greater situational awareness and safer approaches while flying into challenging airports. The technology improves the likelihood of a stable approach by offering a precise, repeatable flight path that can be fully coupled to the autopilot or flown manually.

Since 2023, Honeywell’s FMS Guided Visual (FGV) approaches have been available in North America and provide lateral and vertical guidance to the runway during visual approaches. Now, in addition to more than 30 North American airports that currently use the technology, the FMS offering will soon be available at six European airport/runway combinations, some of which are procedure overlays for existing Visual Maneuvers with Prescribed Tracks.

“Stabilized approaches offer pilots a range of benefits, from preventing overbanking and potential stall conditions to helping maintain situational awareness in conditions that make it difficult to identify the runway. They also offer the added ability to prevent steep approaches, which can otherwise lead to additional brake wear, noise from maximum thrust reversers, and runway overrun,” said Jim Johnson, senior manager of Flight Technical Services at Honeywell Aerospace Technologies. “By integrating our FMS technology, pilots can now make a safer, more stabilized approach to challenging airports in a more efficient manner.”

Today, more than 600 customers use Honeywell FGV approaches on their aircraft in North America. Since the technology’s integration, pilots flying into select challenging North American airports have told Honeywell that FGV approaches provide a consistent and reliable flight path to runways that do not have a precision approach.

“Honeywell has taken all the variability out of the visual approach. It allows me to fly visual approaches with the same precision and passenger comfort we experience using Instrument Approach Procedures. It’s a fantastic improvement to our safety profile and helps us deliver a safe, comfortable approach for our passengers. Given FGV procedures’ low-cost, easy implementation and significant contribution to safety, there really is no reason not to use an FGV whenever it’s available,” said Mark McIntyre, a G650 captain.

FGV approaches are available as an addition to current FMS Navigation Database subscriptions and require no hardware or software updates to use. They are titled "RNAV H" and may be loaded directly from the FMS navigation database. The "H" is used to differentiate it from other RNAV instrument approaches.