Automatic Pilot Report Extraction from Radio Communications

Pilot reports (PIREPs) provide weather information critical to the safety and efficiency of the National Airspace System (NAS), but existing PIREP submission and dissemination mechanisms have persistent deficiencies. To help the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) modernize the PIREP system and increase the number of PIREPs available to the National Airspace System (NAS), the MITRE Corporation Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (MITRE CAASD) developed a prototype to evaluate the feasibility of automatically extracting PIREPs directly from pilot radio communications using automatic speech recognition, neural classifiers, and rules-based translation. The prototype detection system was better than 90 percent accurate and is estimated to produce an order of magnitude more PIREPs than are captured through traditional means in the NAS today. This automated process could ease the burden on controllers and increase the consistency and geographical density of pilot reports to better inform both tactical and strategic traffic planning.