The Federal Aviation Administration’s critical mission of “providing the safest, most efficient aerospace system in the world” translates to 44,000 flights and 3 million passengers every day. The safety and security of domestic airspace depends on a modern National Airspace System (NAS) that can harness advanced technology including AI, modeling and simulation, and cloud.

In this video discussion, Michael Cole, GDIT chief technology officer for federal civilian, joins Michael Hawthorne, director for aviation, and Jay Olsen, vice president for mission software, to discuss how the FAA can accelerate mission delivery with technology.

For example, Hawthorne explains how automation, in the form of autopilot technology, has been in place at the FAA and in the aviation industry more broadly for decades. Now, artificial intelligence will enable an expansion of the other uses of automation underway at the agency today.

“The FAA has been using algorithms and data to make predictions for years,” Hawthorne says. “This includes predictions about flight paths, conflicts and organizing the airspace. Those algorithms have been honed over time, but AI and ML are groundbreakers. They allow the agency’s systems to not rely on occasional updates, but to learn as they go and to update their recommendations dynamically.”

This is the type of work GDIT has partnered with the FAA for many years with traffic flow management and as the agency’s first cloud partner.

As Olsen notes, “when we think about modernization, we think about things like actively applying AI-assisted software development across the full software development lifecycle and moving into things like code generation and code suggestion to accelerate development.”

This also extends to testing, security vulnerability and resolution, and deployment automation so that teams can embrace a continuous improvement, continuous deployment (CI/CD) mindset and deploy updates and new capabilities daily to quickly respond to customer and mission needs.