If you think that AI in ATC means replacing controllers with AI, think again. This is the main takeaway from the Eurocontrol FlyAI conference that I attended at the end of April. Read more about FlyAI in my blog article.
But AI is coming, and it will play an increasing role in Air Traffic Management even if it doesn’t fully replace the original, version 1.0 human being. For example, a lot of work is going into AI assistants, speech recognition, NOTAM interpretation, and more. My colleague Julija wrote about CHarlie, an AI ATC assistant, and we will be covering this topic in more detail in our blog in the future.
Earlier this week, I saw a demo of a research project that could detect, with great precision and reliability, when an aircraft had vacated the runway at Heathrow Airport. It was called Aimee, so perhaps cute anthropomorphic names are the key to success with AI projects.
Aimee made her appearance during a visit to the tower at Heathrow and the NATS digital airport laboratory. More on that visit soon. For now, here is this week’s round-up of ATM news.
Vincent