One of the world’s busiest hubs, London Heathrow Airport (LHR), is reportedly piloting Artificial Intelligence (AI) to assist Air Traffic Controllers (ATC), who are currently facing staffing shortages across Europe.
Is “AI” just how we are describing any software product now?
Yup, it’s just another remote tower + augmented reality solution.
As in this blogpost from NATS, they are not saying it yet, but soon that Tobii 5 below the screen will be rebranded as “NATS AI powered eye tracking solution”.
(eye tracking in ATC is a good idea tho, I’d love to have that at work).
Oh good, I thought they were hooking a LLM to flight control from the headline.
No and that won’t happen. Not before a very long time tho.
In aviation we are decades late on tech and often presented as “experts in ancient technologies”, because they are approved, safe and we need to keep backward compatibility with older tech still in use by some airlines or country.
We might use machine learning to “optimize” (aka reduce human cost) stuff like airspace capacity management, airport gates assignment, staff planning etc. Some ANSP already do it in Europe.
But that’s no LLM, only big data and machine learning, which is a subset of AI (and that word probably sells more in the media than big data, predictive analytics or ML).
Don’t worry, you’ll crash because of human factor and staff fatigue, not AI :)
I’d apprecaite it if the headlines could stop being terrifying. kthx.
