One of the world's busiest airports is piloting using AI to assist air traffic control

The AI engine has already been tested on over 40,000 flights at London Heathrow, but experts warn AI systems have limitations.

Transcript

00:00It starts with the digital control tower, so that is where we replace the out of the

00:25window view from the traditional tower cab that's above us.

00:29That information, because it's now digital rather than an analogue view, means that we

00:34can send that information through processing, and that processing here in the Heathrow lab

00:40is done through our digital artificial intelligence engine.

00:46First is the lack of contextual judgement. So this is that AIs tend to have not fully

01:03developed comprehensions of particular systems, and nuances tend to need to be handled by

01:08humans. The second is data limitations. The AI is most likely to have been trained on

01:15fairly routine, standard airport operations. But actually when we need this at campus,

01:21when things are non-routine, when things are going wrong, and I think this leads back to

01:25the idea that AI is in concert with its human counterpart to produce better results for

01:31everybody involved.