Aviation safety: An initial exploration of the feasibility of using language engineering technologies for reducing pilot-air traffic control miscommunications

This paper describes some initial investigations into the possibilities of using state-of-the-art language engineering technologies to minimise miscommunications between pilots and air traffic controllers. Despite considerable efforts to remedy this situation by providing solutions that focus almost exclusively on new proposals for making air traffic control (ATC) messages clearer and easier to understand and on better ATC communication training strategies, communication problems persist. In order to demonstrate this, we provide two examples from an aircraft accident and incident report respectively, both of which were identified as featuring communication problems between pilots and ATC. Results describe the types of miscommunication in their situational and operational contexts. It is then argued that employing automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) techniques would have the potential to reduce these communication problems and hence might have contributed to preventing the accident and the incident from happening. This paper presents a snapshot of our initial work as well as thoughts on its future development, including a description of how an ASR-MT communication system might be designed and implemented into the flight deck and ATC workspaces respectively and how this system may impact on mental workload, situation awareness, and attention allocation