Honeywell is expanding its flight management system (FMS) guided visuals offering into Europe to equip pilots with greater situational awareness and safer approaches into challenging airports.

Since 2023, Honeywell’s FMS guided visual (FGV) approaches have been available in North America, providing lateral and vertical guidance to the runway during visual approaches. 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.

Now, in addition to more than 30 North American airports that use the technology, the FMS offering will soon be available at six European airport and runway combinations, some of which overlay existing visual manoeuvres with prescribed tracks.

“Stabilised 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,” says Jim Johnson, senior manager of flight technical services at Honeywell Aerospace Technologies. “By integrating our FMS technology, pilots can now make a safer, more stabilised approach to challenging airports in a more efficient manner.”

More than 600 customers use Honeywell FGV approaches on their aircraft in North America. Pilots have reported that the technology provides a consistent and reliable flight path to runways without a precision approach.

“Honeywell has taken all the variability out of the visual approach,” says Mark McIntyre, G650 captain. “It allows me to fly visual approaches with the same precision and passenger comfort we experience using instrument approach procedures.”

FGV approaches are available as an addition to current FMS navigation database subscriptions and require no hardware or software updates. They are listed as “RNAV H” procedures, differentiating them from other RNAV instrument approaches.