Airports Authority of India (AAI) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Honeywell Technology Solutions Lab Pvt. Ltd. to develop a long term collaboration in the field of aviation technologies, systems and procedures, with emphasis on improving safety, security, efficiency, capacity and environmental aspects of India’s aviation operations and infrastructure.
This MoU was signed by Dr. Guruprasad Mohapatra, Chairman AAI and Mr. Akashay Bellare, HTS India Leader in presence of board members of AAI and senior executives of Honeywell Technology Solutions. Honeywell Technology Solutions (HTS) is the integrated technology development and engineering arm of Honeywell having more than 10,000 employees across its centers in the world.
India is currently experiencing significant growth in air travel, which is expected to continue due to increase in disposable income; domestic/international tourism and low air fares. Airports Authority of India (AAI), in the past, has taken many steps to keep pace with the exponential growth by improving the ground infrastructure including airports and air navigation services, to provide optimum services.
One of the challenges, AAI is already addressing, is to determine how best to integrate emerging Air Traffic Management (ATM) technologies into AAI’s operations, the introduction of the new systems, required modification and validation of existing concepts of operations for key ATM functions or the development and validation of completely new concept of operations.
In order to address the challenges, AAI had established a Research & Development Centre at Hyderabad in March, 2013, which has started contributing to address the needs of AAI. An active collaboration with the industry and academic institutions is very essential to scale up the R&D activities that will accrue significant benefits.