// safety systems

Source: Financial Times (paywall)

Air traffic control is one of the few safety-critical infrastructure domains where human judgment still dominates, but capacity constraints—pilot shortages, aging radar systems, surging post-pandemic travel—are creating genuine operational bottlenecks that AI can address. The appeal here isn't sci-fi autonomy; it's narrower: pattern recognition at scale to flag collision risks earlier and assist controllers managing denser airspace, which directly eases the staffing crunch by making controllers more productive per person. This is a rare case where AI solves a concrete operational problem with measurable ROI rather than chasing a speculative efficiency gain.