AI may not replace commercial pilots anytime soon, but the aviation industry is taking the technology to new altitudes. The FAA recently issued a 31-page “Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence Safety Assurance” to outline safety protocols for AI as it becomes more integrated into the aviation industry.
“The recent acceleration in the development of artificial intelligence provides new opportunities to leverage the technology to support a safe aviation system, while posing new risks if not appropriately qualified and used,” said Mr. David H. Boulter, the FAA’s Associate Administrator of Aviation Safety, in the report that was issued on July 23, 2024.
“In the face of these challenges and opportunities, we have developed this roadmap to explain our approach to developing methods to assure the safety of the technology and introduce it for safety,” he said. “The guiding principles described in the roadmap are fundamental to how we are approaching this new technology, leveraging the extensive safety experience of the aviation community with related technologies such as complex systems, software, and automation.”
The Roadmap includes a set of guiding principles for AI integration and interoperability, both in-flight and across aviation systems. The integration of AI will adhere to existing aviation safety requirements and will be treated as a tool to enhance safety, without being humanized. This process will be implemented incrementally, based on real-world applications and experiences, and the FAA will follow a safety continuum, starting with lower-risk AI applications to gain experience and inform broader applications and safety measures.
Additionally, the FAA will continue to work with industry partners, the International Civil Aviation Organization, and other stakeholders to “share insights and develop harmonized global AI safety assurance methods, as appropriate.”
In 2022, the FAA’s Research, Engineering, and Development Advisory Committee recommended that the Administration establish a clear outline of how AI can safely be applied to make flights safer, and through 2023 and 2024, the FAA has held a series of meetings with industry experts to listen to their opinions and priorities for the future of aviation.
Aircraft and avionics designers are clearly looking to incorporate AI into their designs, with a focus on safety, according the report: “Through the technical interchanges, the broader potential for AI in aviation became apparent. The aviation community has invested in data analytics to monitor data from real-world operations and identify precursor events and conditions to then adopt risk mitigations before an accident or incident occurs. AI has already been used in limited areas for curating data for analysis and using this data to estimate risk.”
The Roadmap refers to President Biden’s Executive Order, “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence,” that was issued on Oct. 30, 2023. The order emphasizes an urgency on the part of the U.S. to lead in the development of AI safely and responsibly for the “sake of our security, economy, and society.”
AI has already been used in the industry to chart optimal flight paths. According to Avionics International, Alaskan Airlines has tested out an AI program called Flyways. The program shaved an average of five minutes from flights, which over multiple flights, can save hundreds of thousands of gallons of jet fuel.
The aerospace company Air Space Intelligence (ASI), developed Flyways. According to ASI, “Flyways is an AI-enabled operating system that improves and accelerates decisions for operators across various roles in the air domain. Flyways is designed for high-stakes decision making in a rapidly changing environment where operators must make high-quality decisions quickly. It fuses unstructured data, applies AI to generate a predictive operating picture, and recommends contextually relevant actions to the human operator.”
The International Air Transport Association (IATA), based in Geneva, Switzerland, held a brainstorming session in April 2023 that brought together over 100 participants from over 41 airlines, to discuss the applications of AI in the industry. Out of that session, several priorities emerged: Route optimization, customer support, disruption management, personalized travel planning and customized travel offers.
In the weeks after the session, IATA conducted three social media polls, on its Instagram, LinkedIn and X accounts, to gauge which priority mattered most to the aviation public. The polls revealed, unsurprisingly, that disruption management was most important.
