As part of a broader effort to modernize America’s aging air traffic systems, the FAA last week announced several new AI tools that will address ongoing problems with flight safety and congestion. This comes just two months after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy revised his budget request to Congress to emphasize AI. Although there are many different models created by many different companies, the main thing is that they will synthesize the data that the FAA keeps in different databases. This should allow analysis that cannot currently be done quickly or efficiently, resulting in fewer airport conflicts and flight delays.
One AI model is called Foundry, created by defense contractor Palantir. By looking at data currently “scattered across the federal government and other sources”, it will look for identifiable patterns in airport security issues. politico. In other words, it will find specific actions or locations that cause more problems than usual, which the FAA can turn into new guidance, investments, or upgrades. The AI’s findings will be reviewed by real live humans, so if everything goes well we should not apply any hallucinations. The development is estimated to cost $4 million in the first year.
Just to make it clear, Foundry will look for repetitive behavior or hotspots that increase statistical risk; This is not at all a minority report, prejudicing individual examples. The March collision between Air Canada Express Flight 8646 and a fire truck, for example, is not something the foundry could have imagined. At the end of the day, the people in air traffic control towers and vehicles have to make the right call at this time. No AI can help you in this.
smart flight with smart
Separately, Boston-based defense company Air Space Intelligence (ASI) won a bid to build an AI model to reduce traffic congestion by predicting bottlenecks and delays. The FAA announced that “Flow Management Data and Services (FMDS) will be the new technology backbone of the FAA’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center.” ASI will also create another system within FMDS called Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories (SMART).
Basically, right now, planes fly regardless of how many Other The planes also want to land at the destination airport at the same time. Holding patterns and landing delays are similar. Also, once again, a lot of the available data, such as weather, airport construction, and runway closures, are all kept in different systems, so it is difficult to coordinate all this information in real time. ASI’s AI models are promising to eventually do just that, at a cost of $875 million bloomberg.
What could possibly go wrong?
“It’s not often you hear the industry say to the FAA, ‘You’re moving too fast,’ but we are getting that from our operator partners as we work with them to be able to deploy this in September,” said Steve Fulton, FAA senior certification advisor. aviation week. Yes, the rollout for ASI’s Smart is scheduled for just a few months from now. Handing over something as important as air traffic to AI, even with human oversight, is a huge step. The private sector in general may be hungry for AI, but it still feels the government needs to push a little.
This will be at least a phased rollout, in that it will initially be used only on traffic above 24,000 feet. But that’s still a lot of planes! The question will be whether these AI systems need more testing before they are introduced – possibly a lot more. Of course, the government has long been accused of adopting innovative technology too slowly. One could argue that this is how the country’s air transport system first deteriorated to its present troubled state. Is immediate adoption of cutting-edge technology the answer? We’re about to find out.
