Exploring the socio - technical challenges confronting the adoption of AI in organisational settings is something that has so far been largely absent from the related literature . In particular, r esearch into requirements for trustworthy AI typically overlooks how people deal with the problems of trust in the tools that they use as part of their everyday work practices . This article presents some findings from an ongoing ethnographic study of how current tools are used in air traffic control work and what it r eveals about requirements for trustworthy AI in air traffic control and other safety - critical application domains.

Real-time assessment of near-term Air Traffic Controller (ATCO) task demand is a critical challenge in an increasingly crowded airspace, as existing complexity metrics often fail to capture nuanced operational drivers beyond simple aircraft counts. This work introduces an interpretable Graph Neural Network (GNN) framework to address this gap. Our attention-based model predicts the number of upcoming clearances, the instructions issued to aircraft by ATCOs, from interactions within static traffic scenarios. Crucially, we derive an interpretable, per-aircraft task demand score by systematically ablating aircraft and measuring the impact on the model's predictions. Our framework significantly outperforms an ATCO-inspired heuristic and is a more reliable estimator of scenario complexity than established baselines. The resulting tool can attribute task demand to specific aircraft, offering a new way to analyse and understand the drivers of complexity for applications in controller training and airspace redesign.

This paper describes a simple yet efficient repetition-based modular system for speeding up air-traffic controllers (ATCos) training. E.g., a human pilot is still required in EUROCONTROL's ESCAPE lite simulator (see https://www.eurocontrol.int/simulator/escape) during ATCo training. However, this need can be substituted by an automatic system that could act as a pilot. In this paper, we aim to develop and integrate a pseudo-pilot agent into the ATCo training pipeline by merging diverse artificial intelligence (AI) powered modules. The system understands the voice communications issued by the ATCo, and, in turn, it generates a spoken prompt that follows the pilot's phraseology to the initial communication. Our system mainly relies on open-source AI tools and air traffic control (ATC) databases, thus, proving its simplicity and ease of replicability. The overall pipeline is composed of the following: (1) a submodule that receives and pre-processes the input stream of raw audio, (2) an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system that transforms audio into a sequence of words; (3) a high-level ATC-related entity parser, which extracts relevant information from the communication, i.e., callsigns and commands, and finally, (4) a speech synthesizer submodule that generates responses based on the high-level ATC entities previously extracted. Overall, we show that this system could pave the way toward developing a real proof-of-concept pseudo-pilot system. Hence, speeding up the training of ATCos while drastically reducing its overall cost.

Air transportation is essential for society, and it is increasing gradually due to its importance. To improve the airspace operation, new technologies are under development, such as Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). In fact, in the past few years, there has been a growth in UAS numbers in segregated airspace. However, there is an interest in integrating these aircraft into the National Airspace System (NAS). The UAS is vital to different industries due to its advantages brought to the airspace (e.g., efficiency). Conversely, the relationship between UAS and Air Traffic Control (ATC) needs to be well-defined due to the impacts on ATC capacity these aircraft may present. Throughout the years, this impact may be lower than it is nowadays because the current lack of familiarity in this relationship contributes to higher workload levels. Thereupon, the primary goal of this research is to present a comprehensive review of the advancements in the integration of UAS in the National Airspace System (NAS) from different perspectives. We consider the challenges regarding simulation, final approach, and optimization of problems related to the interoperability of such systems in the airspace. Finally, we identify several open challenges in the field based on the existing state-of-the-art proposals.