BOB JOHNSON, PRESIDENT AND CEO, HONEYWELL AEROSPACE

PARIS AIR SHOW 2001

	June 17	June 18	June 19	June 20

On the Record with
BOB JOHNSON, PRESIDENT AND CEO, HONEYWELL AEROSPACE

Honeywell Offers 'Timely' Solution

For Bob Johnson, GE's acquisition of Honeywell will be like coming home.

"I worked for GE for 24 years," the president and CEO of Honeywell Aerospace told Show News. And now he's going to work for GE again in a leadership role-if and when EU Competition Commissioner Mario Monti approves the merger deal.

But then Johnson never really got away from the GE connection. He recalls a meeting one day while at AlliedSignal, some time before it absorbed Honeywell, when GE CEO Jack Welch came to speak at the invitation of AlliedSignal CEO Larry Bossidy, himself a GE alumnus:

"I looked around the room and there were about 20 people there in our top leadership team who used to work for GE."

Honeywell and GE, he says, have very similar DNA (not a new financial term, but a reference to genetic makeup). "They see a lot of the same things: a big emphasis on Six Sigma processes aimed at improving the delivery of products and services to customers; and e-business (though GE calls it digitization)," Johnson says.

"Jack Welch has talked about GE being a service company, and this whole strategy transcends our business too. So our cultures and processes, while certainly not the same, are very similar. At the same time, our products are complementary."

AlliedSignal won plaudits as the most admired aerospace company under the leadership of Daniel Burnham (now CEO of Raytheon). "So our acquisition by GE will bring together the most admired aerospace company with the most admired company," Johnson says. "That is a very exciting opportunity."
-- J.M.

Two years ago Bob Johnson and AlliedSignal came to Paris in exactly the same state they're in today-unable to talk about the future while awaiting regulatory approval for a major acquisition.

Then, AlliedSignal had just announced it would merge with Honeywell. Now Honeywell (since successfully merged with AlliedSignal) is the target, pending its acquisition by General Electric.

So, unable to talk about strategy, Johnson-president and CEO of Honeywell Aerospace-is taking delight in talking instead about Honeywell's vision of making flying better for airlines and passengers alike.

And that vision is about to become reality with the naming here of the first two customers to sign up for a product so new it didn't even have a name only a month before the show.

Loosely termed an "Aviation Information Solution," the product aims to arrest flight delays. Last year the airlines lost $2.5 billion through delays, and according to Johnson fully 80% of them were caused by factors that could have been under the control of the carriers and their operations centers.

"What we're doing is turning the airplane into an information and communications center so the airlines can know more about the status of the equipment in real time," he says. "This lets them be more in control of when a maintenance activity takes place."

But the system goes much further. It feeds that data through predictive and planning software, linking the aircraft to operations, maintenance, planning and the supply chain.

"This lets an airline make real time decisions about how to optimize usage of aircraft, and ties in the ground operations on the airside of the airport," Johnson says.

The system utilizes Honeywell's Airline Maintenance and Operations Support System (AMOSS), which links an aircraft's avionics and digital diagnostic boxes to the airline's maintenance computers by means of an air-to-ground datalink. The information ties into an innovative ground-based software system that provides state-of-the-art maintenance management and aircraft systems diagnostics.

Open architecture means it will work with any manufacturer's equipment. But it is not, Johnson insists, a "drop-in" product. Instead it will be customized and optimized to meet each customer's needs.

By John Morris

A timely new product from Honeywell to remotely detect faults in aircraft wiring is being unveiled here at Le Bourget.

The handheld wire integrity device can detect to within one centimeter any fault in the wiring, or cracked or chafed insulation-all from one location.

"When you go do the actual maintenance-you go straight to the fault," says Honeywell Aerospace president and CEO Bob Johnson. "We believe this can save airlines up to 20% of the cost of performing this maintenance, and greatly add to airline safety."
-- J.M.


Advanced Search \| Tips