SayFlight
Operational Decision Architecture

Aviation AI Readiness Survey

A decision-architecture diagnostic for aviation organizations that need to understand whether AI has the policy, authority, data, and governance foundation it requires before automation begins.

Not a technology audit.
Not a vendor evaluation.
Not a compliance artifact.

What you get

Preliminary readiness band and composite score after submission.

Four dimension profile: policy, decisions, information, governance.

Any review signals are reserved for SayFlight interpretation before recommendations are issued.

AI Policy Readiness

Whether employees know what tools they may use, what data is prohibited, and who approves AI use.

Has your organization issued an AI acceptable-use policy?

This includes basic rules for ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, and similar tools.

Have you identified which AI tools employees are already using?

Include personal accounts, browser extensions, meeting assistants, document tools, and embedded AI features.

Are employees told what company, client, aircraft, crew, maintenance, or trip data may not be entered into AI tools?

This is the first shadow-AI control point for sensitive aviation data.

Have employees been trained on responsible AI use and held accountable to that guidance?

Training should be documented, not just mentioned in a meeting.

Decision Articulation

Whether critical operational decisions are defined clearly enough for AI to assist without inventing context.

Are your recurring operational or maintenance decisions mapped by owner, input, authority, and capture requirement?

Examples include release, deferral, crew assignment, discrepancy triage, parts priority, or IROP response.

Are escalation thresholds documented for decisions that become ambiguous, time-critical, or high consequence?

AI needs to know when not to continue and when a human authority must take over.

Can you reconstruct why a critical operational decision was made weeks or months later?

This includes the source inputs, accountable role, timestamp, and authority basis.

Do non-routine events follow a defined playbook rather than being assembled through tribal knowledge?

Think diversions, mechanical interruptions, crew timeout, aircraft-on-ground events, or urgent maintenance tradeoffs.

Information Environment

Whether source-of-truth, data provenance, and conflict-resolution paths are clear enough for automation.

Is there a documented system of record for each operationally important data type?

Schedule, aircraft status, crew qualification, maintenance status, manuals, risk, client requirements, and similar data.

When systems disagree, is there a defined resolution path and authority?

Automation cannot responsibly reconcile conflicting sources without a rule and an accountable owner.

Would your manuals, SOPs, and knowledge sources be safe and useful if loaded into an enterprise AI environment today?

This is about currency, ownership, contradictions, permissions, and whether the content reflects actual practice.

Do people know where AI-surfaced information came from and how current it is?

Trust requires provenance, especially in regulated operating environments.

Governance Boundaries

Whether the organization has defined where AI may assist, recommend, participate, or must be prohibited.

Is there a named role or committee authorized to approve AI tools and use cases?

Without this, tool adoption tends to drift department by department.

Have you defined where AI may assist, recommend, automate, or be prohibited from participating?

This is the boundary between useful automation and unsafe delegation.

Are AI initiatives reviewed against safety, compliance, privacy, and operational-risk controls before use?

For many aviation organizations, this should connect to SMS or equivalent risk-management review.

Are you engaging AI vendors only after defining the decision pathways and boundaries they would operate within?

Vendor diagnostics are useful only when the operating architecture they are diagnosing is already explicit.

Send Me The Result

Where should this readiness profile be attached?

Organization type