The aviation industry struggles with delayed flights, unexpected passenger rush, and flight safety – issues that are all closely related and are the result of pilot shortages. To sort out all the problems at once, Airbus, a premium aviation company is betting hugely on artificial intelligence. In partnership with Acubed, a Silicon Valley innovation center, Airbus is working on its Wayfinder project. This project is aimed at developing autonomous flight solutions powered by machine learning for next-generation aircraft.  They aim to build scalable, certifiable autonomy systems to develop self-piloted aircraft applications for single-pilot operations. Wayfinders though is focused on self-piloted aircraft, its immediate goal remains to ensure the safety of the aircraft.

The project aims to automate certain functions compatible with single-pilot commercial flights with the ability to perceive the environment to make decisions like a professional pilot. In order to accomplish this, the Wayfinder team uses a statistical model to enable the AI system to learn abstract behavior from large data sets. Wayfinder though seems to be quite optimistic about the project, for it can change the way urban mobility is planned, but it does have a few roadblocks. According to what was mentioned by Airbus in one of its blogs, a major challenge it currently faces is dealing with the complexity of aircraft data. Designing the autonomous features requires data from all types of conditions such as take-off, landing, daytime conditions, nighttime conditions, snow storms, and datasets from thousands of different airports. The ultimate goal of Airbus is to release a ready-to-use product rather than stop at developing proof of concept.