AI in Aerospace: Boeing’s Helen Lee

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
Many tasks could benefit from advanced technologies, but how can organizations use emerging technologies in high-stakes situations? Find out how the aerospace industry is approaching AI in today's episode.

**Helen Lee** (0:14)
I'm Helen Lee from Boeing, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:20)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI.
I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I'm also the AI and Business Strategy guest editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:38)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG, and I co-lead BCG's AI practice in North America. Together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI for six years, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:04)
Shervin and I are excited to be talking today with Helen Lee, regional director of air traffic management and airport programs in China for the Boeing Company. Helen, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Welcome.

**Helen Lee** (1:15)
Thank you for having me.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:17)
Let's get started. Helen, can you tell us about your current role at Boeing?

**Helen Lee** (1:22)
I currently work at Boeing China in Beijing office. My main responsibility is to oversee Boeing's airport and air traffic management programs in China. And we try to do here is to improve the airport and airspace operational efficiency and at the same time to enhance flight safety. I've been doing consulting for airport and ATM for 10 years. And the interesting part is every project is very different and able to work with different group of people. Air traffic management is not the core business for Boeing. But what we really want is to help our customer. And because airlines are our customer, we want them to operate more efficiently and also enhance their flight safety.
Other than design and manufacture of aircraft, we also provide a lot of services to our airline customers. It's kind of like an entire ecosystem that Boeing and actually other partners were working together on it. For example, we provide flight planning to airline customers. And so that will help them to better plan their flights and optimize their flight path.
And that also will reduce their fuel consumption and emission of carbon dioxide.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (2:50)
Air traffic management has always been quite fascinating to me because I always think of there's tens of thousands of aircraft at any given time in the air. And you have different systems trying to do air traffic management or air traffic control for that aircraft. It feels like it's very data centric. It's also somewhat maybe chaotic where unpredictable things can happen. And then you probably have, I don't know, you tell us some interaction effects between different ATMs or air traffic management systems. But can you just educate us and our audience a bit on what it is and how it works and how sophisticated and complicated it is?

**Helen Lee** (3:37)
So you probably all know that a flight usually takes six phases, testing on the ground, either testing in or testing out, and then take off from the runway and then start climbing and then enroute and then start descend and land. So there's six phases of it. And in each phase, there are air traffic controllers controlling the aircraft.
General aviation in the US is very different. They could fly in controlled airspace. But for most of our commercial flights, you need to go through these six phases. First, you have a controller at the ground and you probably see that airport at the high tower, that's ATC tower. They have the ground controller that control the ground movement. And then there's the tower controller control the takeoff and landing.
And once the aircraft climb to a certain altitude, you will be hand over to approach controller or departure controller. You can say that. So that controller will handle the aircraft to about 30 to 60 nautical miles from the airport. And then you will pass to en route controller. And then the en route controller usually have to go through several centers.
And in each center, there could be many sectors.
And each sector will usually manage by one controller. And so they hand off one by one all the way through to the landing site. So that's how they work. But I have to say, AI is still not widely used in ATM system. There's many, many challenges when you talk about it later. But they're still using voice communication mostly. And so that's the part that hasn't been replaced by just data link communication yet. But we're moving to that direction.