Artificial Intelligence: Flight

Artificial intelligence has found a home within many functions in the aerospace industry. For example, artificial intelligence has been used to assist in airport security and management of air traffic, along with certain applications of intelligent flight.

In Europe, artificial intelligence has been identified as being able to combat challenges in airspace capacity, digital transformation, and complexity in the continuing inclusion of intelligent aircraft. With the COVID-19 pandemic, many believe that incoming innovation in aircraft-based artificial intelligence will soon appear. As artificial intelligence gains knowledge from learned experience, training AI in response to the pandemic may prove useful if a similar occurrence were to appear again in the far future. Improving aircraft technology may also help create a more economically sustainable flight environment.

NASA has been testing artificial intelligence with flight control since the early 2000s, where flight control rules could be created, in order to deal with malfunctions on a pilot’s control surface. Aircraft such as the Boeing 777 have even been paired with automated navigation and landing, while also being able to respond to emergency weather situations.

Artificial intelligence is even being tested alongside military vehicles, in the United States. For example, in 2020, intelligent co-piloting was accomplished in a U-2 “Dragon Lady” spy plane. Countries such as China have also taken to AI to apply futuristic touches to their military vehicles. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley believes that artificial intelligence could be used in military forces worldwide, within the next decade: "Maybe (in) 10 to 15 years max, you are going to see the widespread, ubiquitous use of robots throughout most militaries in the world."

In the future, aircraft technology could move to the cockpit, to assist in processing weather data, along with a pilot’s flight plan, in order to monitor the flight path. It can be seen that artificial intelligence has been used to work alongside the trained professional, and may prove to create a safer world, as technological innovation progresses.