Building Trust in the Skies: A Knowledge-Grounded LLM-based Framework for Aviation Safety

Improving flight safety with flight data requires not only accurate detection of risk events, but more importantly, clear interpretation of their underlying causes at the level of pilot control behavior. Existing explainable AI techniques, such as feature importance maps, often require considerable domain knowledge to translate them into operationally meaningful explanations. Large Language Models (LLMs), which excel at language reasoning, bring a promising solution to this issue. However, applying LLMs in this domain presents key challenges such as modal inconsistency, limited classification ability, scarcity of task-specific data for fine-tuning, and lack of domain knowledge. To overcome these challenges, we propose FlightLLM, a prior-guided semantic LLM-based approach for interpretable flight safety analysis. Specifically, we first perform feature engineering to address modal inconsistency, combining statistical descriptors with physically meaningful flight indicators. This representation is further processed by a Semantic Discretization module, which converts abstract numerical patterns into qualitative descriptions that are more compatible with language reasoning. In addition, since LLMs are not inherently strong classifiers, CatBoost is incorporated as a statistical expert, and its prediction results are injected into the prompt as prior guidance. A contrastive few-shot learning strategy is further adopted to compensate for limited data. Finally, we design structured prompts to embed aviation-specific knowledge into the inference process. Using hard landing, a representative risk event with complex causal mechanisms, as an anchor point, we evaluate FlightLLM on a dataset of 704 real-world A320 flight samples. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves competitive classification performance while generating direct and reasonable explanations for event causes.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) advance toward embodied AI agents operating in physical environments, a fundamental question emerges: can models trained on text corpora reliably reason about complex physics while adhering to safety constraints? We address this through PilotBench, a benchmark evaluating LLMs on safety-critical flight trajectory and attitude prediction. Built from 708 real-world general aviation trajectories spanning nine operationally distinct flight phases with synchronized 34-channel telemetry, PilotBench systematically probes the intersection of semantic understanding and physics-governed prediction through comparative analysis of LLMs and traditional forecasters. We introduce Pilot-Score, a composite metric balancing 60% regression accuracy with 40% instruction adherence and safety compliance. Comparative evaluation across 41 models uncovers a Precision-Controllability Dichotomy: traditional forecasters achieve superior MAE of 7.01 but lack semantic reasoning capabilities, while LLMs gain controllability with 86--89% instruction-following at the cost of 11--14 MAE precision. Phase-stratified analysis further exposes a Dynamic Complexity Gap-LLM performance degrades sharply in high-workload phases such as Climb and Approach, suggesting brittle implicit physics models. These empirical discoveries motivate hybrid architectures combining LLMs' symbolic reasoning with specialized forecasters' numerical precision. PilotBench provides a rigorous foundation for advancing embodied AI in safety-constrained domains.

Air Traffic Control (ATC) is a safety-critical domain in which incorrect interpretation of instructions may lead to severe operational consequences. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong general performance, their reliability in operational ATC environments remains unclear. Existing evaluation approaches, largely based on aggregate metrics such as F1 or macro accuracy, treat all errors uniformly and fail to account for the asymmetric consequences of high-risk semantic mistakes (e.g., incorrect runway identifiers or movement constraints). To address this gap, we propose a safety-oriented, consequence-aware evaluation framework tailored to ATC operations. Our results reveal that while current LLMs achieve reasonable aggregate accuracy, their operational reliability is severely limited. Evaluated on clean transcripts, the peak Risk Score reaches only 0.69, with most models scoring below 0.6 despite high macro-F1 performance. Further analysis shows that errors concentrate in high-impact entities despite relatively stable action-type classification, indicating structural grounding deficiencies. These findings highlight the necessity of consequence-aware evaluation protocols for the responsible deployment of AI-assisted ATC systems.