When there is an incident or accident—for example, a pilot deviation—and air traffic control (ATC) is involved, communications between the aircraft and the controllers will be reviewed.
The colloquial phrase for this is “pulling the tapes.” These tapes contain conversations between pilots and ATC and are fast-paced, verbally dense, and often occluded by cockpit noise or VHF distortion. If there has been an event, these tapes have to be reviewed multiple times as they are often an integral part of the investigation.
It is about to get easier for ATC to review those tapes thanks to ATTranscribe, a new software program created by UFA Inc., a company that specializes in simulation and training systems for air traffic control.
“We’re still pulling the tapes and transcribing them the same we did 25 years ago,” said Dale Drake, director of ATC sales at UFA, who has more than 25 years experience in air traffic control training. “It can take an ATC technician six to seven hours to transcribe one hour of radio transmissions. You have to play the tape, rewind, and play it again, then someone else comes in to listen and verify the transcription.”
According to Drake, ATTranscribe eliminates the need for pulling highly qualified technicians out of the control tower to listen to and transcribe tapes as the software can automatically decipher the data from the live environment, adjusting for different words per minute, and contextualizing the information.
Drake stressed that this is specialized software, not artificial Intelligence as we know it.
“AI doesn’t work in aviation because aviation phraseology is just abnormal,” he said.
ATTranscribe automatically adjusts for cockpit and VHF noise using purpose-built and trained machine learning on ATC communications. It is designed to support controllers by producing initial transcription, analysis, and reports with fully secure data.
According to UFA, ATTranscribe provides more than 60 percent reduction in transcription work hours while delivering greater than 90 percent accuracy across 3,000 hours of recorded ATC audio.
“We believe ATTranscribe will completely transform the workflow of incident review,” said David Wolff, CEO of UFA. “By translating raw ATC communications into structured, analyzable data, we are saving the time of skilled workers while helping safety teams extract valuable insights faster and more accurately than ever before.”
Wolff said that the new technology will likely help controllers identify trends and warning signs of systemic issues through automated analysis of large historical archives. This information could be used to better train ATC professionals in the future.
Drake noted that the information can be tagged with keywords, and with time-synced playback and searchable data, investigators can replay ATC communications alongside transcriptions, filter by keywords, and extract relevant segments for reports. These reports can then be used to identify weak spots in the system, and these can be addressed to improve safety.
“ATTranscribe has the potential to reshape how we investigate and learn from air traffic communications,” adds Lawrence Pennett, president of UFA. “By enabling rapid transcription and automated analysis of recorded or live communications, we can accelerate safety improvements across the industry.”
Pennett pointed out that the new technology can be applied to incident investigation, regulatory compliance, and training debriefs. The ATTranscribe can be customized with facility-specific terminology, additional languages, and integrations via standardized application programming interfaces.
