FAA Office of Aerospace Medicine 
Civil Aerospace Medical Institute 

Report No: DOT/FAA/AM-23/37

Title and Subtitle: Feasibility, Utility and Usability of Pilot Reports PIREPS Submission and Retrieval Using VHF Radio, Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence Tech
Report Date: September 2023

Authors: Kratchounova, D., Baumgartner, H., Smith, C., Underwood, M., Langebrake, L., George, T., White, A.

Abstract: Pilot reports (PIREPs) are reports describing in-flight weather conditions submitted by pilots that provide crucial weather information to other pilots for pre-flight and in-flight planning. The current PIREP system is antiquated, prone to error, and has been identified as a safety concern according to a 2017 National Transportation Safety Board Special Investigation Report. This paper describes the results from a proof-of-concept study investigating the feasibility, utility, and usability of a PIREP submission and retrieval concept that uses VHF radio, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. In flight, pilots were able to submit and retrieve PIREPs without talking to an air traffic controller or a flight service specialist. Instead, they used VHF radio to communicate with an automated ground station via a voice-user interface. On the ground, pilots were also able to retrieve the experimental PIREPs submitted within the two study locations via a website and a mobile app in three different modes: audio playback, voice-to-text transcription and plain text. This proof-of-concept study successfully demonstrated the application of already existing as well as state-of-the-art off-the-shelf technologies as one potential way to modernize the current PIREP system and improve its resiliency.

Key Words: Pilot weather reports (PIREPs), Aviation weather, Voice-user interface, Cloud computing, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence (AI)

No. of Pages: 99