TrustFlight Expands AI Suite with ‘Smart Documents’

Following its recent acquisitions of three Wheels Up subsidiaries, TrustFlight continues to expand its portfolio of aviation safety and compliance software and services while growing its workforce. In fact, the company unveiled its latest software solution, Smart Documents—which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to draft and validate compliant manuals and documents—on Tuesday at NBAA-BACE.

Smart Documents works in tandem with Smart Regulations, an AI chatbot for regulatory and compliance queries, which TrustFlight introduced in May. The two AI tools together form the foundation of TrustFlight’s SmartSuite platform, which the company says will “eliminate the friction between regulatory intelligence and operational execution,” thereby improving operational efficiency, safety, and compliance.

With Smart Regulations, “We basically loaded all of the global regulations into this big database…imagine like a ChatGPT interface that you can ask any question and it delves into the regulations—not just the internet,” Reuben Mann, TrustFlight’s senior director of marketing, told AIN. This search function is now integrated with Smart Documents, allowing users to reference specific regulations while drafting documents.

“There are a lot of people thinking that AI is going to replace their subject-matter-expertise jobs, but that's not necessarily the case,” Mann explained, expanding on how Smart Regulations works. “What we’re offering is a tool that allows subject matter experts to access regulations really quickly and effectively, and even interrogate specific questions or use cases in different regions. So if they want to find an answer for the FAA and EASA and find some sort of median ground that covers both regulations, and they can quickly do so, and the agent will spit out an answer.”

In a demonstration of the difference between a comparison of FAA and EASA regulations for safety management systems (SMS). Kaden Oseen, AI product manager at TrustFlight, showed how the Smart Regulations agent works. “It’s not a ChatGPT response in the sense that it’s going to give you a quick answer and all the information that may or may not be accurate,” he said. “It’s going to perform research on the regulations and then come back with an answer that cites exactly which regulations were relevant to its response at each point.”

After asking the agent to compare FAA and EASA SMS, within minutes it provided an overview and comparison of each regulatory framework’s approach to SMS. Links are included to each set of regulations.

“We’re getting quite a detailed answer here in terms of a comparison of each of the different aspects,” he said. “But the key point is that everything is easily grounded and verifiable through the links that are provided in text directly to that regulation.”

The user could also ask Smart Regulations to lay out the information in a table for easier comparison between FAA and EASA philosophies. But it also provides a conclusion, summarizing EASA’s emphasis on organizational approach versus the FAA’s separate, dedicated SMS. “That’s the general conclusion it came to from the comparison,” he said.

Integrating Smart Documents with TrustFlight’s Centrik 5 platform brings the power of Smart Regulations to tedious research tasks. Using Smart Documents, manuals that might take months to draft from scratch can be almost entirely auto-generated, Mann explained. “You tell it what kind of document you want, and then it’ll give you a big template and just write it for you,” he said. “Yes, you have to go back and adjust it, but it’s so much nicer to have a skeleton that tells you all the different components that should be part of a particular document.” 

“You can have templates for all the different types of documents that you want in aviation, and it’ll give you a good starting point,” he said. “If you’re not sure, then Smart Regulations is embedded in Smart Documents, and you can ask it questions and it’ll give you real answers from real regulations that you can put into your document.”

Centrik 5 is a tool for managing cloud-based quality and safety management systems used by thousands of professionals across virtually all segments of the aviation industry, including business aviation operators and service providers, airlines, airports, aircraft manufacturers, maintenance providers, and training organizations.

TrustFlight is showcasing its SmartSuite and Centrik solutions this week at NBAA-BACE. Also on display at the company’s booth is its Tech Log electronic logbook software. 

During this year’s NBAA show, TrustFlight is looking to highlight how the company has recently grown into a fully end-to-end safety platform, Mann told AIN. “We’re not just an SMS provider or a QMS provider—we actually have the whole end-to-end safety solutions that all operators need.”

He explained that following its acquisitions in August of Baines Simmons, Kenyon Emergency Services, and Redline Assured Security from Wheels Up, TrustFlight now covers “everything from prevention at the very beginning, so having good safety processes as well as operational software like Centrik to make sure that you’re actually compliant, and we now also have emergency services.”

Mann added that TrustFlight is working with Air India on its investigation into the deadly crash in Ahmedabad on June 12.