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FARNBOROUGH—The aviation industry is still in “the foothills” of what can be done with artificial intelligence (AI), industry chief technology officers (CTO) believe.
At a CTO forum on the sidelines of the airshow on Wednesday, a group of CTOs agreed that AI was allowing aerospace engineers and developers to work faster than would have been possible a few years ago.
“Think of AI as a force multiplier,” Boeing CTO and VP engineering and technical innovation Lane Ballard said. “The beauty of AI is that it consumes data, so a lot of the menial analysis that engineers had to do in the past could now be done by AI. Data that used to take a month or a year to analyze could now be done in a few hours.”
Ballard’s comments were echoed by Rolls-Royce group director, engineering technology & safety, Simon Burr. AI should be used to work through mounds of data and get to the heart of problems, at which point engineers could use their skills and ingenuity to solve the issues, he said.
Burr added that the aviation industry was merely “in the foothills” of what could be done with AI, which can handle amounts of data too large for human brains.
The audience also heard that AI has the capability to scale up aspects of aviation manufacturing from what has essentially been a craftsman’s industry, creating components at previously unheard rates. This is likely to see next-generation engines being produced at far faster rates.
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