The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) wants to know what AI capabilities industry has in store that can help the agency improve aviation safety, according to a request for information (RFI) released last week.
The FAA’s June 11 RFI “seeks to identify existing capabilities for advanced analytics using modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities to improve aviation safety within the industry and meet the FAA’s requirements for understanding underlying causal factors for top safety events in the National Airspace System (NAS).”
The agency is looking for information from industry on 11 different topics – including providing a capability statement – by July 2.
The FAA said it currently has internal capabilities such as the Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing (ASIAS) system that is utilizes for safety information analysis and sharing across various aviation stakeholders, helping to monitor and improve safety standards within the NAS.
According to the FAA, its current capabilities constitute an “extensive collection of connected and disconnected systems.”
“The FAA envisions a new safety analytics system that will vastly expand and accelerate insights from current and additional sources of data and provide a comprehensive understanding of causal factors of safety events to help predict high-risk operations and environments,” the RFI states.
“The end state will be built on commercially available analytics tools that are widely used by a substantial number of companies and organizations to make similar improvements to the safety of operations or to reduce mistakes in operations,” according to the RFI.
The FAA noted that the new safety analytics system requires integration into the existing agency infrastructure. Key challenges of that integration requirement include data sensitivity; data variety; integration; and time to insights, the agency said.
