US aerospace technology specialist Honeywell is currently conducting an international tour to demonstrate its resilient airborne beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) communications capabilities.
The connectivity demonstrations are being conducted using a company Boeing 757-200 test aircraft that was acquired by Honeywell in 2005. For the purposes of demonstrating resilient BVLOS communications, the aircraft is fitted with Honeywell’s JetWave MCX Ka-band satellite communication (satcom) system as well as an L-band Airborne Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (LAISR) solution and an L-band Iridium satcom capability.
The JetWave MCX system offers wide frequency coverage across the civil and military Ka-band frequencies and access to multiple satellite networks to enable a resilient, managed service under a single IP address.
The LAISR service, meanwhile, is a global L-band on-demand subscription service, tailored for ISR missions, that provides multi-megabit data rates via Inmarsat’s ELERA L-band seamless worldwide network. It thus supports full-motion video, data transfer and command-and-control (C2) capabilities using low-profile, small-form-factor LAISR terminals.
Honeywell executives stressed that their resilient BVLOS solutions, which are about “right-sizing the right solutions with the right equipment” are entirely scalable, from large airborne C2 platforms to unmanned aerial vehicles. However, key platforms being targeted by the campaign include the Embraer KC-390 tanker-transport aircraft, the Lockheed Martin C-130 transport aircraft and the Airbus A330 Multi-Role Tanker Transport (MRTT) aircraft.
After visiting the Egypt International Airshow at El Alamein International Airport from 3 to 4 September, the Honeywell demonstration team then headed to London, where on 9 September a select group of defence journalists followed by a delegation from the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) were hosted on demonstration flights. After then attending the Defence in Space conference in London from 11 to 12 September, the Honeywell team was then scheduled to visit Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Ankara, Bydgoszcz and Oslo. These locations were tied to either live opportunities in relation to KC-390 and C-130 operators or further market development.
To describe the concept of resiliency, Honeywell executives briefing on 9 September referred to the acronym PACE, whereby there are primary, alternate, contingency and emergency levels of communications connectivity.
Wes Cook, director of operations for Honeywell’s defence services, posed the question, “When you hear that word ‘resilient’ … what does that mean?”
He answered that question by saying that, “to the operator … resilient means ‘This is something that I can depend on.’ And at the basics of military operations you need to move, shoot and communicate. And if you can move and shoot and you can’t communicate, that is a very dangerous situation for yourself and for the elements that are operating on your left and right. So ‘resilient’ means that you have multiple capabilities to get the mission done. The way that we support resiliency for our military operators is through PACE.”
Paul Page, business development director for Honeywell Aerospace, explained the complexity of providing resilient airborne BVLOS communications. “Out of the three sectors – maritime, land and aviation – certainly our experience from the Honeywell perspective is that aviation is quite possibly the most demanding sector,” he noted. “If you think about it, a metal tube flying through the air at more than 800 km/h, trying to connect to satellites, depending on the type of network, which if geostationary will orbit at 36,000 km away, keeping them connected and keeping a secure pipe that transfers data anywhere around the globe is quite an achievement. Challenges include overcoming high-entry barriers to install the systems on the aircraft in meeting stringent supplemental type certificate (STC) and airworthiness standards and, as I just said, the complexity of tracking satellites from fast-moving platforms. We at Honeywell actually have a pedigree in navigation and this is why we excel at doing that.
“There’s a lot of other integrators that will tell you that they can deliver this resiliency,” Page added, “but when it comes to aviation, with all those challenges, with the STCs, with the line fit of the equipment, working with other integrators, and then having the relationships with the satellite network operators, there really isn’t anyone in our space that is competing at the same level, [given] the challenges we’ve already overcome in aviation.”
Meanwhile, Cook elaborated on some of the capabilities Honeywell provides in addition to the solutions themselves. “As a service provider, we’re providing our customers with insights on how the aircraft operates and how the operation of the platform in three dimensions, with banking and depending on the direction of travel, can have an effect on the performance of the satcoms,” he explained. “So obviously, if we have a geostationary link on our SHF [super-high-frequency] antenna, there are scenarios where we would lose connection to the satellite – if you bank too hard, if the tail comes between the antenna and the satellite, and those types of things – so what we found, especially in the military context, is that if you provide this information to the pilots, if you provide it to the operators, if they’re able to analyse the flight path in advance of the mission, they’re able to take in those considerations so that they reduce the risk of having those degradations during the mission. All that we do gets captured in our environment and is available for post-mission review by the operators, maintainers, flight crew. So it’s just one of the many added-value services that we provide in this space that a lot of our competitors don’t.”
For its demonstrations on 9 September, which were flown out of London’s Stansted Airport, the Honeywell B757 test aircraft adopted a mission scenario that saw it initially using the 5G/LTE network availability on the ground before transitioning once airborne to the globally accessible Viasat GX Ka-band network. The test platform then simulated entering a contested environment, where it demonstrated a seamless failover to the L-band LAISR network, before then entering the ‘theatre of operations’, where it switched to a regional high-capacity Ka-band network. Moving back through a contested environment with a seamless failover to an L-band SwiftBroadband high-data-rate connection, the aircraft then returned to base on the high-capacity Ka-band Viasat GX network and then transitioned back to 5G/LTE once on the ground.
During the flight on the morning on 9 September the journalists on board were able to use their mobile devices to videophone contacts on the ground, although an issue with the aircraft’s onboard wi-fi network did lead to patchy connections. However, Honeywell sources were able to confirm that the afternoon flight with the UK MoD delegation went exactly as planned, with the aircraft’s full connectivity capabilities demonstrated.
The B757 test platform previously demonstrated its resilient airborne BVLOS capabilities during the US Air Force’s Exercise ‘Northern Edge 23-1’, which took place in Alaska in May 2023. For this exercise, Honeywell executives noted that the aircraft had effectively been integrated as part of the US Air Force to demonstrate its capabilities.
