Product: Runway Management Solution Developers: Alon Nitzan, Aviv Goner, Oded Hanson Company: Xsight Systems Start of Development: 2001
Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris, was the site of a horrific aviation accident in the year 2000. A Concorde aircraft with 109 passengers and crew on board, crashed into a hotel on the outskirts of the airport shortly after takeoff, killing all on board. The accident investigation report found that the cause of the accident was a short metal strip that had fallen from another plane and landed on the runway a few minutes before the Concorde took off. This strip of metal caused one of the Concorde’s tires to burst, hitting the aircraft’s fuel tank, and causing the fire that fatally damaged its engines.
The tragic accident focused attention on the issue of runway safety at airports around the world. Three Israeli entrepreneurs – Alon Nitzan, Aviv Goner and Oded Hanson – all Air Force graduates, engineers and technology enthusiasts, decided to establish a company that would address this field. In 2005, they founded Xsight Systems with the aim of providing an overall solution for managing airport runways by enhancing their safety, operational efficiency and capacity.
Xsight systems began as part of the Innovation Authority’s Technology Incubator Program at Givat Ram in Jerusalem. The limited resources were compensated by a keen feeling of mission and an aspiration for excellence and the company soon began developing its flagship product: the FODetect system that is used to detect and issue alerts of foreign object debris on the runway.
The system’s most up-to-date version, called RunWize, is an advanced and groundbreaking sensing system that enables continuous monitoring of the runway and automatic detection of situations that may endanger the aircraft: foreign objects (pieces of metal, tire or asphalt fragments etc.), birds and other wildlife, and precipitation such as ice and snow.
Xsight Systems has developed an advanced runway management solution that improves the day to day operation of runways whilst increasing runway safety, capacity and efficiency. The flagship technology is a unique solution collocated with runway edge lights and utilizes a combination of millimeter wave radar and image processing to best detect FOD, birds, wildlife and monitor runway condition and activity day and night in all weather conditions. The FODetect system is based on Surface Detection Units (SDUs) distributed along both sides of the airport runway. FODetect significantly reduces the risk of safety problems and of delays in the runway’s operations and expedites the investigation of any subsequent incidents.
The system is authorized by the main standards bodies around the world and is installed in a number of leading civilian and military airports, including Ben Gurion Airport.
