Your Shopping Cart
Surface Ops gives airport vehicle crews the same real-time surface picture air traffic control sees in the tower — and warns them before a runway conflict. Cockpits have had this for decades. Now the driver has it too.
Airfield safety rests on trained crews, procedures, and radios — and it works. Yet traffic alerting in the vehicles working the movement area is still the rare exception. Surface Ops changes that — with a barrier to entry low enough for any airport.
Source: FAA / DOT OIG runway-incursion data (FY2024).
“Drivers on the movement area have had the least information of anyone out there. With VMATs the tower can see them and most aircraft can see them, yet drivers were left behind for real-time alerting.”
Cyriel Kronenburg, Vice President Airports & ATM, uAvionix
FlightLine SAI — our deployment of the FAA Surface Awareness Initiative — and APRT sensors generate the surface picture and feed the tower. Surface Ops delivers that same feed to the driver. Add a VTU-20 and the vehicle becomes visible to the tower, too.
Ground sensors capture the ADS-B picture — the surface at SAI airports, the airspace at APRT towers.
The tower picture, distributed in real time.
The driver sees it — and gets proactive alerts.
The tower’s live picture, following your vehicle — ADS-B targets from the FlightLine sensors, and the FAA surveillance feed at ASDE-X and ASSC airports.
CHECK RUNWAY and CHECK FINAL as a conflict develops; TRAFFIC RUNWAY and TRAFFIC FINAL when it is imminent. Visual and audible, the runway outlined in red, and they clear on their own once the runway is vacated.
Surface Ops learns which ADS-B track is the truck you are in and offers it by callsign, so your own vehicle never counts as traffic against you. Position and alerts stay on GPS.
Runways, taxiways, aprons, hotspots and hold-short lines for any US airport, cached for use offline, with designator labels you can switch on and off.
Tap any target for tail number, type, origin and destination, and its last 30 minutes of track. Data tags in three sizes.
Every alert this session, timestamped and per airport — runway, squawk, crash phone, diversion and constraint — reopened in full with a tap.
Web and iOS. Your airport’s FlightLine feed with an activation code, the FAA surveillance feed at ASDE-X and ASSC airports, or a portable skyAlert receiver where there is no feed at all.
Snow ops, night work, non-towered fields — it keeps working. When an FAA feed is in maintenance, the app says so.
Recent releases turn Surface Ops from a runway‑alerting app into a live operations picture — the same feed, doing more for the people who run the field.
An aircraft that filed somewhere else is now heading to you — type, route and ETA, minutes before it becomes your problem. Time to stage a gate, stairs, fuel, or ARFF.
The tower activates the crash phone and a digitised summary reaches the cab in seconds — aircraft, runway, souls on board, fuel and wind — with the affected runway lit on the map.
7500, 7600 or 7700 turns that aircraft red for everyone on the field. A lost‑comms aircraft is one the tower cannot instruct — the vehicles working around it should know first, not last.
Every alert threshold is set per airport by your own operations team, behind a PIN — tested on one device, then pushed to the fleet. Your field, your geometry, your tolerance.
Two low beeps means check something. Three high beeps, repeating, means act. A driver learns the difference once and then never has to look down to know which one it was.
Runway demand for the next three hours against the airport’s acceptance rates, the FAA’s active runway configuration, arrivals and departures boards for the next hour, and the constraints in force — ground stops, delay programmes, deicing.
METAR, TAF and D-ATIS for the active airport, minute-by-minute precipitation for the next hour, and National Weather Service alerts, with a weather pill on the map that warns of rain in the next hour.
Scrub back through up to seven days of surface traffic — pause, scrub, 1x / 4x / 10x. The screen frames itself in amber while a replay runs. Ask us to add it to your organisation.
Alerts you can trust. A departing aircraft is released the moment it is safely airborne, and traffic moving away from you is filtered out — so the alerts that do fire mean something. An alert clears itself once the runway is vacated, and fires again as a new one if you come back on from another taxiway. The app learns which track is your own vehicle, so your truck never alerts you about itself. Ground stops, delay programmes and weather never make a sound at all; they are there when the driver looks, and silent when they don’t. A vehicle stopped at the hold line is still told about the aircraft on final, which is exactly when the driver is deciding whether to cross. And when the FAA feed goes into maintenance the app says so instead of going quiet.
The app is alert-first — crews drive, and it speaks up only as a conflict develops. Two levels, tuned to how your field actually operates.
Surface Ops and the uAvionix VTU-20 close the loop between the vehicle and the tower. Where the FAA has published a vehicle transmit map, Surface Ops draws it on the airport diagram: where the vehicle broadcasts, and where it stays silent. No SAI or APRT airport yet? Self-install the FlightLine receivers — or have uAvionix install them — and Surface Ops still works.
The sensors on the field, the picture in the tower, and the vehicles made visible with a VTU-20.
Three airports put Surface Ops in their vehicles ahead of launch and have run it in daily operations for months.
Savannah runs the KOVA crash phone. The tower activates it, and a digitised summary — aircraft, runway, souls on board, fuel and wind — is in the driver’s hand seconds later. It is the alert nobody wants and the one everybody working the field should get.
Vehicles work the movement area around the clock at Tampa, alongside airline traffic on parallel runways. Every alert screenshot in this material was captured there, on real traffic.
“At Tampa International Airport, safety is one of the most important factors in our day-to-day operations. TPA was one of the first airports in the country to deploy the uAvionix SAI system, and we have since had a great partnership in developing new innovative solutions to further maximize the benefits of this system for the airport, including the deployment of VMATs.”
Lloyd Hersey, Director of Airport Operations and Emergency Management, Tampa International Airport
Jackson Hole runs FlightLine APRT in the tower. Surface Ops works from that same picture, so the vehicles see what the controllers see with nothing new to install on the field. In Savannah and Jackson Hole the app is connected to the tower’s crash-phone system, so an Alert call to ARFF reaches every active driver on the field.
“Jackson Hole Airport has always been at the forefront of deploying ADS-B based safety enhancing technology. We were an early adopter of VMAT to enhance the visibility of our snow removal fleet on the airfield, and we are one of the first airports to deploy the uAvionix airborne situational awareness display (APRT). This active alerting system will further enhance our ability to provide a safe operating environment for drivers, pilots and passengers.”
Dustin Havel, Chief Operating Officer, Jackson Hole Airport
A subscription on the surveillance your airfield already has. Nothing to build, nothing to install, nothing to wait for.
Licence the airport, then cover the vehicles you choose — ten trucks or two hundred. The more of the fleet you bring in, the less every vehicle costs.
Ops, fire, fuel, handlers, airlines. Every organisation working your movement area can be in the same picture, each on its own licence.
Register the transponder serial and its cover rides with that vehicle’s Surface Ops licence — and lowers that licence rate. One vehicle, one line, one renewal, and cover that doesn’t expire while the subscription runs.
No procurement programme, no installation crew, no site visit. It renews once a year, and you can stop it before it does.
Inquire about pricing.
Request a live demo and put Surface Ops in your operators' hands.
Each product is a chapter of one story — sense → see → be seen → be aware. This page is one chapter; start anywhere, they connect.
Surface awareness for the tower — the picture every vehicle and aircraft appears in.
View page → Sense · SeeRadar-like airspace awareness for contract towers — without the radar.
View page → Be seenThe FAA-approved vehicle transponder (VMAT) — ADS-B Out on the surface.
View page → Be awareThe tower’s picture & proactive runway alerts in the driver’s cab.
You are here AccessPortable ADS-B receiver for fields with no infrastructure at all.
Coming soon Be aware · cockpitADS-B In on the flight deck — Sentry is the receiver uAvionix builds for ForeFlight.
Partner ↗