Improving taxiing instructions with natural language understanding

What is it about?

Currently, air traffic controllers issue taxiing instructions to pilots verbally over radio. While the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) prescribes specific rules and phrases for these communications, pilots and controllers can still make mistakes. Previously, researchers looked into replacing voice communications with text ("data communications"). However, voice communications have many advantages. Our research finds that it's feasible to automatically extract digital taxi instructions from these voice communications, opening up new possibilities for air traffic control communication systems.

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Photo by Yiyang on Unsplash

Photo by Yiyang on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Issuing and following taxiing instructions is critical for airport safety. Several incidents have occurred where an aircraft mistakenly travels across an active runway. One example is an incident at JFK airport in January 2023, when a flight took the wrong taxiing route and crossed an active runway without clearance, forcing another aircraft to abort its takeoff procedure. An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board determined that interruptions and multitasking contributed to the crew's mistake. Automatically extracting digital instructions from speech communications is an easy way to confirm that instructions were properly received without significantly changing how pilots and controllers communicate.