Following several months of numerous high-profile aviation accidents, new data suggest pilots are facing a specific threat when it comes to keeping airline passengers safe in the skies. Last year, drones accounted for approximately two-thirds of reported near-midair collisions with commercial aircraft taking off or landing within the country's 30 busiest airports, according to the Associated Press. The findings come as aviation safety data indicate drones accounted for the highest number of near-misses since 2020, with the first reports dating back to 2014. "The rise in recreational and commercial drone use has simply outpaced education and enforcement," aviation attorney Jason Matzus told Fox News Digital. "More people are flying drones without fully understanding the rules or the risks."

Arriving home at Los Angeles international airport, Sara Hussein is asked by immigration and customs officers to step aside, then taken to an interview room. The fundamentals of this scene are familiar – you've probably watched something like it in a film, or dreamed about it happening to you; perhaps it already has. But Sara lives in a new world, several decades in the future, and she is being arrested because Scout, the state's AI security system, has flagged something irregular inside her mind. Sara seems unexceptional: she's a museum archivist, married and mother to young twins. She once had an argument with her husband Elias after he impulsively part-exchanged the family Toyota for a Volvo.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved unprecedented performances in various applications, yet evaluating them is still challenging. Existing benchmarks are either manually constructed or are automatic, but lack the ability to evaluate the thought process of LLMs with arbitrary complexity. We contend that utilizing existing relational databases based on the entity-relationship (ER) model is a promising approach for constructing benchmarks as they contain structured knowledge that can be used to question LLMs. Unlike knowledge graphs, which are also used to evaluate LLMs, relational databases have integrity constraints that can be used to better construct complex in-depth questions and verify answers: (1) functional dependencies can be used to pinpoint critical keywords that an LLM must know to properly answer a given question containing certain attribute values; and (2) foreign key constraints can be used to join relations and construct multi-hop questions, which can be arbitrarily long and used to debug intermediate answers. We thus propose ERBench, which uses these integrity constraints to convert any database into an LLM benchmark. ERBench supports continuous evaluation as databases change, multimodal questions, and various prompt engineering techniques. In our experiments, we construct LLM benchmarks using databases of multiple domains and make an extensive comparison of contemporary LLMs. We show how ER-Bench can properly evaluate any LLM by not only checking for answer correctness, but also effectively verifying the rationales by looking for the right keywords.

Predicting air traffic congestion and flow management is essential for airlines and Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSP) to enhance operational efficiency. Accurate estimates of future airport capacity and airspace density are vital for better airspace management, reducing air traffic controller workload and fuel consumption, ultimately promoting sustainable aviation. While existing literature has addressed these challenges, data management and query processing remain complex due to the vast volume of high-rate air traffic data. Many analytics use cases require a common pre-processing infrastructure, as ad-hoc approaches are insufficient. Additionally, linear prediction models often fall short, necessitating more advanced techniques. This paper presents a data processing and predictive services architecture that ingests large, uncorrelated, and noisy streaming data to forecast future airspace system states. The system continuously collects raw data, periodically compresses it, and stores it in NoSQL databases for efficient query processing. For prediction, the system learns from historical traffic by extracting key features such as airport arrival and departure events, sector boundary crossings, weather parameters, and other air traffic data. These features are input into various regression models, including linear, non-linear, and ensemble models, with the best-performing model selected for predictions. We evaluate this infrastructure across three prediction use cases in the US National Airspace System (NAS) and a segment of European airspace, using extensive real operations data, confirming that our system can predict future system states efficiently and accurately.

Wake vortices - strong, coherent air turbulences created by aircraft - pose a significant risk to aviation safety and therefore require accurate and reliable detection methods. In this paper, we present an advanced, explainable machine learning method that utilizes Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data for effective wake vortex detection. Our method leverages a dynamic graph CNN (DGCNN) with semantic segmentation to partition a 3D LiDAR point cloud into meaningful segments. Further refinement is achieved through clustering techniques. A novel feature of our research is the use of a perturbation-based explanation technique, which clarifies the model's decision-making processes for air traffic regulators and controllers, increasing transparency and building trust. Our experimental results, based on measured and simulated LiDAR scans compared against four baseline methods, underscore the effectiveness and reliability of our approach. This combination of semantic segmentation and clustering for real-time wake vortex tracking significantly advances aviation safety measures, ensuring that these are both effective and comprehensible.

Increased deployment of autonomous systems in fields like transportation and robotics have seen a corresponding increase in safety-critical failures. These failures can be difficult to model and debug due to the relative lack of data: compared to tens of thousands of examples from normal operations, we may have only seconds of data leading up to the failure. This scarcity makes it challenging to train generative models of rare failure events, as existing methods risk either overfitting to noise in the limited failure dataset or underfitting due to an overly strong prior. We address this challenge with CalNF, or calibrated normalizing flows, a self-regularized framework for posterior learning from limited data. CalNF achieves state-of-the-art performance on data-limited failure modeling and inverse problems and enables a first-of-a-kind case study into the root causes of the 2022 Southwest Airlines scheduling crisis.

The air transportation local share, defined as the proportion of local passengers relative to total passengers, serves as a critical metric reflecting how economic growth, carrier strategies, and market forces jointly influence demand composition. This metric is particularly useful for examining industry structure changes and large-scale disruptive events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This research offers an in-depth analysis of local share patterns on more than 3900 Origin and Destination (O&D) pairs across the U.S. air transportation system, revealing how economic expansion, the emergence of low-cost carriers (LCCs), and strategic shifts by legacy carriers have collectively elevated local share. To efficiently identify the local share characteristics of thousands of O&Ds and to categorize the O&Ds that have the same behavior, a range of time series clustering methods were used. Evaluation using visualization, performance metrics, and case-based examination highlighted distinct patterns and trends, from magnitude-based stratification to trend-based groupings. The analysis also identified pattern commonalities within O&D pairs, suggesting that macro-level forces (e.g., economic cycles, changing demographics, or disruptions such as COVID-19) can synchronize changes between disparate markets. These insights set the stage for predictive modeling of local share, guiding airline network planning and infrastructure investments. This study combines quantitative analysis with flexible clustering to help stakeholders anticipate market shifts, optimize resource allocation strategies, and strengthen the air transportation system's resilience and competitiveness.

The Aircraft Landing Problem (ALP) is one of the challenging problems in aircraft transportation and management. The challenge is to schedule the arriving aircraft in a sequence so that the cost and delays are optimized. There are various solution approaches to solving this problem, most of which are based on operations research algorithms and meta-heuristics. Although traditional methods perform better on one or the other factors, there remains a problem of solving real-time rescheduling and computational scalability altogether. This paper presents a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework that combines graph neural networks with actor-critic architectures to address the ALP. This paper introduces three key contributions: A graph-based state representation that efficiently captures temporal and spatial relationships between aircraft, a specialized actor-critic architecture designed to handle multiple competing objectives in landing scheduling, and a runway balance strategy that ensures efficient resource utilization while maintaining safety constraints. The results show that the trained algorithm can be tested on different problem sets and the results are competitive to operation research algorithms. The experimental results on standard benchmark data sets demonstrate a 99.95 reduction in computational time compared to Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) and 38 higher runway throughput over First Come First Serve (FCFS) approaches. Therefore, the proposed solution is competitive to traditional approaches and achieves substantial advancements. Notably, it does not require retraining, making it particularly suitable for industrial deployment. The frameworks capability to generate solutions within 1 second enables real-time rescheduling, addressing critical requirements of air traffic management.

Understanding how air traffic controllers construct a mental 'picture' of complex air traffic situations is crucial but remains a challenge due to the inherently intricate, high-dimensional interactions between aircraft, pilots, and controllers. Previous work on modeling the strategies of air traffic controllers and their mental image of traffic situations often centers on specific air traffic control tasks or pairwise interactions between aircraft, neglecting to capture the comprehensive dynamics of an air traffic situation. To address this issue, we propose a machine learning-based framework for explaining air traffic situations. Specifically, we employ a Transformer-based multi-agent trajectory model that encapsulates both the spatio-temporal movement of aircraft and social interaction between them. By deriving attention scores from the model, we can quantify the influence of individual aircraft on overall traffic dynamics. This provides explainable insights into how air traffic controllers perceive and understand the traffic situation. Trained on real-world air traffic surveillance data collected from the terminal airspace around Incheon International Airport in South Korea, our framework effectively explicates air traffic situations. This could potentially support and enhance the decision-making and situational awareness of air traffic controllers.

Integrating Urban Air Mobility (UAM) into airspace managed by Air Traffic Control (ATC) poses significant challenges, particularly in congested terminal environments. This study proposes a framework to assess the feasibility of UAM route integration using probabilistic aircraft trajectory prediction. By leveraging conditional Normalizing Flows, the framework predicts short-term trajectory distributions of conventional aircraft, enabling UAM vehicles to dynamically adjust speeds and maintain safe separations. The methodology was applied to airspace over Seoul metropolitan area, encompassing interactions between UAM and conventional traffic at multiple altitudes and lanes. The results reveal that different physical locations of lanes and routes experience varying interaction patterns and encounter dynamics. For instance, Lane 1 at lower altitudes (1,500 ft and 2,000 ft) exhibited minimal interactions with conventional aircraft, resulting in the largest separations and the most stable delay proportions. In contrast, Lane 4 near the airport experienced more frequent and complex interactions due to its proximity to departing traffic. The limited trajectory data for departing aircraft in this region occasionally led to tighter separations and increased operational challenges. This study underscores the potential of predictive modeling in facilitating UAM integration while highlighting critical trade-offs between safety and efficiency. The findings contribute to refining airspace management strategies and offer insights for scaling UAM operations in complex urban environments.