Intelligent Pilot Advisory System: The journey from ideation to an early system design of an AI-based decision support system for airline flight decks

Kurzfassung

The availability of more and more data from commercial aircraft, opens up new development potential for AI-based assistance systems on the flight deck. In this context, a number of research areas need to be addressed, including the interaction between AI and the cockpit crew. This concept paper discusses the need for an AI-based decision support system in the cockpit of commercial aircraft and provides an approach to realise it. To discuss the need for such a system, existing interviews with pilots were analysed and a subsequent ideation process is conducted to discuss possible applications for a new AI-based assistance system. The idea is then made more concrete by formulating use cases and a first proposal on how such a system could be implemented. The proposed assistance system is intended to serve as a research platform for exploring the human system integration aspects of AI-based applications, as finally demonstrated by two recent research examples.