The FAA wants to use AI for your flight. Here's why.

Tech tools will allow for more proactive data analysis, rather than just responding to incidents.Show Caption

The Federal Aviation Administration struggles to analyze the massive amount of data generated by flights.AI is being used as a tool to help human analysts identify safety trends and prevent future incidents.The technology helps streamline data by recognizing patterns and consolidating information from various reports.Cruising Altitude is a weekly column about air travel. Have a suggestion for a future topic? Fill out the form or email me at the address at the bottom of this page.The Federal Aviation Administration has a data problem.Every flight generates so much data that agency analysts struggle to sift through it all and make sense of trends in flight.That’s not to say that aviation isn’t safe – it is, flying is the safest way to travel – but experts agree that the FAA struggles to make good use of all the data at its disposal.It’s why National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy criticized the agency during a hearing before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation committee in February for ignoring statistics that eventually came up in accident investigations, and why former Department of Transportation Inspector General Mary Schiavo told me she likes to refer to the FAA as the "tombstone agency." The FAA and the aviation industry as a whole have always been good at responding to disasters and preventing similar occurrences from happening again, but predictive analysis has historically proven more difficult."A bad thing happening is a lagging indicator because the bad thing already happened," Jodi Baker, the FAA’s deputy associate administrator for aviation safety management, told me in a recent interview. "There are lots and lots and lots of data sources. And the challenge has always been, how do we glean intelligence out of data sources?"That, she said, is how new artificial intelligence technologies can help the agency analyze more efficiently and ultimately improve safety across the nation’s airspace.With historically high travel volumes and high-profile accidents or close calls hitting the headlines seemingly every week, predictive safety analysis is an aviation use for AI that I can really get behind.How the FAA is using AI to boost safetyThe FAA is already using AI in some applications to streamline data analysis and boost aviation safety.In the aftermath of the DCA crash in 2025, the agency conducted an AI analysis to help determine where mixed helicopter traffic near other airports should be limited, something the NTSB recommended in the wake of the crash. It also uses the technology to comb through incident reports regularly and even conducted an AI analysis to help optimize flight schedules during the government shutdown in the fall of 2025.Baker emphasized, however, that none of these decisions are made without human input. The FAA sees AI as a tool to help human analysts, not as a replacement for them."AI is not running amok. It is all very carefully controlled on what it's trained on. It's trained on our data systems. It's not roaming the internet, coming up with stuff. People are involved with validating what AI is telling us," Baker said. "AI for us is a decision-making tool, but it is not a decision maker. So, people are still involved with the system."Baker noted that a particularly helpful AI application is combing through narrative incident reports to help make sense of the qualitative data for human analysts."I can't tell you how many hours I've spent in my life having conversations around, well, this database says it's a Boeing 737, and this one calls it a B737, and this one calls it a B-737," Baker said. "We had to actually have people kind of marrying this up and spend time cleaning. But you can train AI to say all of these things are a Boeing 737. And so, it can pull it all together really quickly."As AI models are trained at the FAA, they’ll be able to incorporate more parameters and flag potentially dangerous situations more accurately as well. The agency could also use AI models to test the outcomes of rule changes before they are implemented, analyze their effects preemptively, and optimize resource allocation to address issues.The FAA can also use AI analysis to help predict and prevent issues."It's a real-time ability to see what's going on in the system. I mean, in the past, you'd wait. And I didn't really have a good way of tracking leading indicators before. I really waited for something to happen," Baker said. "And now we can track leading indicators, we can track the system as it's operating and see what's going on."How AI is being applied in aviation more broadlyIt’s not just the FAA, either, but the industry as a whole that is using AI’s capabilities to boost safety."AI is very helpful in taking a huge amount of data and learning from it what is normal, because you can include all of those external factors," Kristy Kiernan, associate director for the Boeing Center for Aviation and Aerospace Safety at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, told me. "It will be able to flag the outliers from normal behavior, and we can look at why that is happening."She added that AI could ultimately improve safety by giving industry stakeholders more time and capacity to analyze positive trends, not just respond to dangerous incidents."The vast majority of our flights end safely, and we’re not looking at them because they end well. Don’t you want to be looking at the stuff you do right?" Kiernan said. "We want more good things to happen, we want to understand why things are going right."Kiernan added that AI has its limitations, however, and still needs to be seen as a tool for helping improve safety, not a replacement for other tried-and-true best practices."Just like when you get on a flight deck and you’re working with another pilot, most pilots are taught a fair amount of human factors so they understand their own limitations and strengths and they understand the strengths of their own human copilot," she said. "Where you run into problems is not because of the weaknesses specifically, every system has them, it’s when you’re unaware of it. Calibrating people’s trust effectively – you don’t want to over-trust AI."Will AI replace pilots?No, and it can’t ever really replace other aviation safety professionals, either."You’ll read a lot that 80% of accidents are caused by human error," Kiernan said. "What that does not consider is: how many times has a human intervened in a situation to keep it safe, which was never captured in a data set. If you change the role of a human operator without accounting for the positive role they have been contributing, you introduce uncertainty."For Baker, the introduction of AI tools to assist data analysts represents a new chapter in aviation safety."I've been working in safety for 20 plus years, and this is just a really exciting time," she said.Zach Wichter is a travel reporter and writes the Cruising Altitude column for USA TODAY. He is based in New York and you can reach him at zwichter@usatoday.com.