Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding in Air Traffic Management

Dear Colleagues,

Since Alexa, OK Google and Siri at the latest, voice recognition has become part of everyday life. It does not only allow us to keep our hands free, when we speak a new address into the navigation system, but it can also reduce workload of air traffic controllers (ATCo) and increases air traffic management (ATM) safety.

Voice communication between ATCos and pilots using radio equipment is still widely used in air traffic control (ATC). The ATCo issues verbal commands to the cockpit crew. Whenever the information from voice communication has to be digitized, ATCos are burdened to enter the information – that has already been uttered – manually. Research results show that up to one third of the working time of controllers is spent on these manual inputs. Radar label maintenance is one application of automatic speech recognition and understanding (ASRU). Long known is the support of simulation pilots by ASRU. Another area is, e.g., offline evaluation of historic ATCo-pilot communication to answer questions like:

• How often do ATCos deviate from standard phraseology?
• How many weather reports of pilots are digitized?
• How often does an ATCo or pilot request “say again”?
• How many visual approaches were flown?

The king’s discipline of ASRU, however, is automatic readback error detection, because noisy pilot utterances need to be recognized and understood semantically.

These are only some applications of automatic speech recognition and understanding in ATM, which have been implemented during the last decade in Europe, US, and also in Asia. Researchers are encouraged to publish their latest results. Special focus is on work, which really aims to bring ASRU from the lab environment to the operational environment in the ATC centers in Europe and in the US. 

Prof. Dr. Hartmut Helmke
Dr. Oliver Ohneiser
Guest Editors

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