Augmenting Flight Training with AI to Efficiently Train Pilots

We propose an AI-based pilot trainer to help students learn how to fly aircraft. First, an AI agent uses behavioral cloning to learn flying maneuvers from qualified flight instructors. Later, the system uses the agent's decisions to detect errors made by students and provide feedback to help students correct their errors. This paper presents an instantiation of the pilot trainer. We focus on teaching straight and level flying maneuvers by automatically providing formative feedback to the human student. There is a critical shortage of commercial pilots worldwide: according to Oliver Wyman ( 2022 ), there will be a global gap of 34,000 pilots by 2025. Part of the problem is that pilots qualified to conduct such training are in very high demand and in short supply. Currently, human instructors guide trainees using flight simulator exercises. We posit that training an AI-enabled system to provide instruction for some tasks is a viable approach to reducing instructor workload while allowing them to interact with more students. This could increase the number of students per pilot trainer, improving the throughput of training pilots and therefore increase the supply of trained pilots. In recent human-in-the-loop research, AI agents use advice from humans in different forms to speed up learning (Bignold et al. 2021; Cui et al. 2021; Christiano et al. 2017; Da Silva* et al. 2020) . Specifically, imitation learning allows an agent to learn to mimic a human's behavior. Further, AI has been used for airplane flying (Morales and Sammut 2004; Sandström, Luotsinen, and Oskarsson 2022) as well as inside intelligent tutoring systems for multiple tasks ranging from student skill development (Georgila et al. 2019) to improving teaching strategies (Wang 2018). This paper presents a system where an agent mimics a qualified pilot and assists students in a pilot training program. Specifically, we focus on the straight and level flight task as a proof of concept. A trained agent identifies mistakes or suboptimal maneuvers of trainee pilots inside a flight simulator and suggests corrective actions. To the best of our knowledge, this is a first attempt to use an AI tutor to train human pilots for flight.