3/20/24, 5:24 PM How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming the Aviation Industry | Aviation International News

Paris Air Show 2023

AVIONICS

Beyond Automation: How AI Is

Transforming Aviation
Artificial intelligence isn’t only changing the way airplanes fly—it’s
transforming nearly every aspect of aviation on the ground, too.

Generative artificial intelligence tools will become far more useful when aerospace companies start integrating them with their own intellectual property.
(Photo: GridRaster)

By HANNEKE WEITERING • Science & Technology Editor

June 14, 2023

More than a century after the invention of the autopilot, aerospace engineers are still
working to bring more automated processes into aircraft cockpits to enhance safety, increase
efficiency, and reduce pilot workload. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), autopilot
technology has evolved from simple devices that maintain an aircraft’s altitude and heading
to fully autonomous flight control systems capable of performing gate-to-gate operations
without any human input.

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One way or another, almost every aerospace and defense company exhibiting at this year's
Paris Air Show increasingly is looking to exploit the potential for AI to improve their aircraft
and other systems. This ubiquitous and rapidly morphing technology sphere likely will show
a high profile at several forward-looking events during the main show. They include the Paris
Air Lab, which concentrates on ensuring aviation's sustainable future, and the Avion de
Métiers sessions, meant to lure young technologists into an industry that stands to learn
much about AI from other sectors, such as automotive manufacturing.

In May, EASA released its new AI Roadmap 2.0, which is intended to advance "the human-
centric approach to integrating artificial intelligence in aviation. The updated
document incorporates progress achieved in the field since the publication of the air safety
agency's first roadmap was published in February 2020, drawing on AI use cases involving
aerospace companies, research centers, and academics.

According to EASA, the new roadmap, "provides a comprehensive plan for the safe and
trustworthy integration of AIN in aviation, with a focus on safety, security, AI assurance,
human factors and ethical considerations." Last month the organization also published a
new report on research it commissioned into machine learning application approval, which
highlights approaches to evaluating and certifying AI-based systems.

But AI isn’t only changing the way airplanes fly—it’s transforming nearly every aspect of
aviation on the ground, too. As AI and machine-learning technology have matured in recent
years, the aviation industry has explored ways to capitalize on it by making processes more
efficient and often safer.

For example, aircraft manufacturers and service technicians can use AI software and robots,
including language learning models like ChatGPT, to streamline assembly and maintenance,
repair, and overhaul (MRO) processes. Airlines and other operators can also use AI for fleet
optimization, flight planning, and ground operations. Engineers developing aircraft can use
AI tools to facilitate and speed up the design and certification of products before they even
hit the market.

AI isn’t just the way of the future. The aviation industry already has used at least some
primitive form of AI technology for years, particularly for manufacturing and MRO.
Traditional AI relies on human programmers to define rules and algorithms for pattern-
matching and decision-making processes, and it can analyze large datasets much faster than
humans. For example, MRO providers might use AI to analyze data from the various sensors
onboard an aircraft to predict potential maintenance needs before they arise.

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Generative AI Is Changing the Game

Although the aerospace industry already widely uses AI for various applications, it has only
just begun to make an impact. In the coming years, new applications will begin to emerge as
companies find ways to take advantage of generative AI—models like ChatGPT that use
machine learning and deep neural networks to generate outputs not predefined by human
programmers.

“AI is already helping both manufacturing and repair and maintenance users to work with
robots much better,” Rishi Ranjan, founder and CEO of GridRaster, told AIN. GridRaster is a
software company that specializes in “extended reality” technologies, like augmented reality
and virtual reality, that employ AI and spatial mapping software. It provides such tools for
the aerospace and automotive industries and works with several top U.S. defense
contractors.

According to Ranjan, the U.S. Department of Defense and its top contractors already use
traditional AI tools, but generative AI has the potential to make a much bigger impact on
defense applications, as well as on the wider aviation industry. “We strongly believe that
generative AI will really start helping scale these things to the much bigger aerospace
industry in the next two to 10 years,” he said.

ChatGPT and other language-learning AI models like it generally are adept at disseminating
an astronomical amount of information to yield relevant and—mostly—accurate output
almost instantly. It can tell one how to build and certify an airplane, provide tips for
improving the aerodynamics of an airframe, and even generate maintenance schedules for
specific aircraft.

But the greatest value of generative AI models like ChatGPT will come when aerospace
companies begin to verticalize the technology, integrating it with their own intellectual
property for internal use, Ranjan said.

While ChatGPT and other generative AI models can access all the information publicly
available on the internet, they don’t have access to companies’ valuable, private intellectual
property. Giving AI access to that highly protected information would open up a world of
new use cases for AI across the industry.

“For the real use, what will happen is that companies will have to pay for an AI model like
ChatGPT and start training it—whether ChatGPT enables that or someone will come up
with a solution—so that you can take this massively large learning model and now start

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training it with proprietary data,” Ranjan said. “That will be true for pretty much every
enterprise where IT is very important.”

AI Makes Faster, Better Digital Twins

While ChatGPT is a language-learning model that only outputs text, generative AI can also
create images and 3D models. In aerospace, that can be particularly useful for generating
digital twins.

Aircraft developers and MRO providers alike nowadays often rely on sophisticated virtual
models known as digital twins to simulate products, like aircraft and their various
subsystems, in a digital environment. Engineers can leverage digital twins to speed product
development timelines by reducing the need to physically build and test things, thereby
minimizing costs. MRO technicians use digital twins for predictive maintenance and to
detect anomalies by comparing real-world sensor data to the data generated by digital
twins.

While digital twins can help to save time and resources, they’re also expensive and time-
consuming to create. But generative AI will soon make the process of building digital twins
much faster.

“Traditional AI is still very manual, and a digital twin is an extremely manual process to
build,” Ranjan said. “Large AI models like ChatGPT, once you can verticalize these for the
aerospace industry, can remove a lot of that manual work. They can look at text data and
image data and start helping you create a digital twin for these automatically.”

According to Ranjan, generative AI will soon allow companies to build digital twins for just a
small fraction of what it costs today. For every $1 spent on building a digital twin with
traditional methods, “in another three to four years you're looking at like 10 cents,” he said.
“In another 10 years, it might be one cent.

“Now these expensive solutions will start getting into the hands of more users,” Ranjan
added, noting that he expects just about every aerospace company to be using some form of
internal generative AI technology within two to three years.

Will AI Take Our Jobs?

As with just about any other industry, the impact that AI will have on the job market is not
yet clear. Robots have already taken over some tasks that humans originally performed in
the aerospace industry, and new autonomous airplanes will reduce the demand for
commercial pilots.

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However, AI has the potential to create jobs that didn’t exist before. Those new roles might
involve maintaining AI systems for both aircraft and ground operations, developing
algorithms, and ensuring that AI gets used ethically and responsibly.

According to Ranjan, aircraft manufacturers and technicians don’t need to worry about
robots taking their jobs. Rather, he believes that AI will change the way they work. “The
human in the loop is always going to be there,” he said. That’s because AI, while good at
pattern recognition and making predictions, will never improve on human perception, he
explained.

“If you want the best efficiency in aerospace, because of the high [amount of] intellectual
property and very large knowledge base that is needed to operate these things, it will always
be a complementary relationship” between machines and human staff," he said.

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