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This Ex-Pilot Is Building AI for the Cockpit
How AI systems can support frontline aviation teams by improving access to critical information during operations — from NOTAMs to EFB fragmentation.
Show Notes
Leo Kotil, a former airline and business aviation pilot turned tech founder, explains how the bottleneck in aviation isn't lack of digitization but retrieval under operational constraints. Pilots face thousands of manual pages, fragmented Electronic Flight Bag applications, and NOTAMs where important data gets buried. The conversation covers operational search latency as a safety consideration, signal extraction from high-volume NOTAM information, and hybrid inference systems with offline aviation backups.
Click to expand the full episode transcript (8,874 words approx.)
Use cases discussed
Aviation AI use cases from our catalogue that this conversation touches on.
Develop a chatbot to provide real-time guidance to frontline employees on regulatory requirements and company policies.
Overwatch AI is explicitly built as an AI assistant for frontline aviation workers—pilots, OC managers, engineers—to access regulatory and operational documents in real time.
Read use caseApply text summarization and question-answering models to provide concise, actionable insights from complex regulatory texts.
Leo describes LLM-based Q&A surfacing relevant snippets from 200+ documents totalling thousands of pages, delivering concise answers in seconds instead of minutes.
Read use caseAutomated pre-flight checklists and risk assessment using natural language processing to ensure compliance.
Leo extensively discusses pre-flight procedures, checklists, and how AI assists pilots accessing correct information during aircraft preparation under time pressure.
Read use caseUtilize natural language processing to automatically categorize and prioritize communication requests based on urgency and importance.
NOTAM filtering is a central use case: critical deicing or operational notices buried in dozens of pages are extracted and prioritised for pilots automatically.
Read use caseData-driven decision support systems that integrate multiple data sources (e.g., flight schedules, weather, passenger data) to assist airport managers in strategic planning and decision-making.
Leo explicitly describes integrating flight data, weather, AIPs, aircraft records, and crew schedules into a unified contextual decision-support assistant for pilots.
Read use caseAutomated document processing and data extraction from various sources to streamline administrative workflows and improve data-driven decision-making.
Leo states 80% of their work is making 200+ documents AI-ready, processing thousands of pages to enable fast automated retrieval for frontline workers.
Read use caseAutomated analysis of weather data and its impact on flight schedules and operations.
Leo explicitly describes fetching live weather from official sources and contextualising it against weather limitation documents within a single pilot query.
Read use caseIntelligent cockpit automation systems that use AI to assist pilots with decision-making, task prioritization, and workload management during critical phases of flight.
Episode title and content directly address AI cockpit assistance—reducing pilot information overload, task prioritisation, and decision support during pre-flight and operations.
Read use caseEp 2: Beyond Line of Sight: The Infrastructure Drones Need to Fly
Ep 4: Dude, Where's My Car? The Hidden Cost of Broken Indoor Navigation
Building AI for Aviation?
Airside Labs helps aviation organisations validate AI systems before deployment. From adversarial testing to compliance evaluation, we bring 25+ years of aviation data expertise to ensure your AI is safe, compliant, and production-ready.
About the Travel Tech Podcast
Hosted by Alex Brooker, founder of Airside Labs, the Travel Tech Podcast features authentic long-form conversations with leaders, innovators, and startup founders shaping the future of aviation and travel technology. No scripts, no sponsors, no sales pitches — just real conversations about building technology that matters.