The aviation industry is always looking for ways to improve their aviation services like logistics chain, customer enquiries, and airport environment, among others. But the biggest concern for the aviation industry has always been air safety. Whereas the past year, 2019 was the third safest year in the history of commercial flights, but it still faced 280 deaths and 20 fatal crashes. That’s the thing with air travel and its safety, the probability of people surviving in an unfortunate commercial flight event is less, which makes air safety a significant concern. And now, with the emergence of newer technologies, the aviation industry has turned to artificial intelligence (AI) to improve air safety.
According to a survey, 97.2% of the aviation companies have decided to put their investments in big data and AI towards safety and other measures. The global aviation market has been forecasted at $2.2 billion by 2025 from 2018. So as more people travel through the air in commercial flights, these aviation companies do recognise air safety as one of the top priorities. Giants like American Airlines, United Airlines, Southwest, etc., have already started investing and adapting AI and using big data to make their airlines more secure and more efficient overall.
AI Applications To Improve Air Safety
The AI systems can find its potential in flights for dealing with problems in air traffic control, cockpit management, and maintenance. However, right now, AI is used widely in training and education of future pilots with increasing application to improve air safety.
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AI For Bad Weather Forecasting
In the future, the AI system will be used to interpret information for the airborne flights’ radar and monitor the weather. The AI system can make comparisons between the flight plans of a plane that is about to take off while continuously monitoring the weather. This AI system can correctly assess the weather condition, pre and post-take-off. The AI system can suggest the pilots about the best route to take for landing for an airborne flight while continuously monitoring any change in the weather conditions and changes in the wind.
Landing Safe With AI
Airbus uses a system called runway overrun prevention systems (ROPS), which runs some compatibility checks such as the length of the runway, approach speed, the weight of the aircraft and weather conditions, and sends out a message in case of a severe incompatibility.
The ROP uses aircraft’s deceleration while landing and aircraft characteristics to identify a safe spot for the plane to stop on the runway. If an automatic brake mode is enabled, the ROP will apply the brakes automatically in case of an overrun on the runway is predicted.
AI As The Co-Pilot
In future, an aircraft might only need one pilot. If AI is integrated with aircraft, then not only it will follow a pre-determined route, but will also be able to fly the plane with real-time monitoring. This real-time monitoring will be the of environmental conditions that cannot be predicted by humans and might be able to action or suggest them in advance to ensure safety.
AI To Improve Air Traffic Management (ATM)
With so many flights taking off, airborne and landing in the sky level that these aeroplanes can fly, the ATM becomes one of the crucial points when it comes to air safety. The ATM can benefit from AI in areas like flight planning, conflict prediction and safety assessments.
The AI systems can also improve the trajectory prediction and safety with the addition of reducing the delays. In a crowded air space, this trajectory prediction can help ensure more safe air travel routes. Researchers are developing conflict and complexity prediction tools which can predict risky situations based on the past data that is fed to it to avoid fatal events. The AI will also help in improving the prediction by minimising the instances of ionosphere error where the satellite navigation system’s signals can be affected by the atmospheric change.
AI in Aircraft maintenance
A trained AI system can predict and give out maintenance solutions of an aircraft and shares insights on the aircraft’s present technical condition to the operatives for them to fix it in time or replace the parts. The AI can analyse and predict the imminent breakdown of the aircraft parts, which plays a huge factor in the safety of the aeroplanes. Although human technicians do check the parts before the flight takes off along with the regular maintenance checks, AI can evaluate and predict the failures well ahead of the time using the data on the plane.
Outlook
The air safety issue is one of the crucial things for the aviation industry, and it might be the only place where people will not mind leveraging their privacy to have as much air safety as possible. AI is not only making strides in the aviation safety department but also helping airlines to improve their customer experience, reduce the massive issue of delays, and improve the environment of the air space and the security of the passengers. AI has immense potential to make the future of the aviation industry bigger as well as safer.
