Artificial Intelligence

• Establishing governance frameworks to steer and oversee the use of AI within the CAA, creating opportunities for our colleagues to identify potential enhancements.
• Developing staff capability through training and targeted skill development, with the aim to mature the colleagues’ AI literacy skills.
• Piloting the use of AI to support regulatory processes and decision-making.

• Engaging with industry to understand how AI is being deployed and plans for future use, so that we can enable safe adoption.
• Monitoring emerging technologies, risks, and trends to ensure that we stay on track with technology.
• Collaborating with government and international partners on AI-related issues.

• Working with innovators through our Innovation Advisory Services.
• Exploring how existing regulatory frameworks apply to AI-enabled systems.
• Identifying areas where additional guidance or clarification may be needed.

We are developing a comprehensive view of how AI is being applied across the aviation system.

This work will:

• Map AI use cases across different parts of the sector.
• Identify where AI introduces new or evolving risks.
• Assess how widely and rapidly AI is being adopted.

This will provide the evidence base needed to:

• Target regulatory activity where it is most needed.
• Develop proportionate guidance.
• Anticipate future regulatory challenges.

AI often cuts across existing regulatory boundaries, both within aviation and more broadly.

We are analysing how AI interacts with:

• Existing CAA regulatory frameworks
• Other UK regulators and cross-government responsibilities
• International regulatory approaches

This work will:

• Identify gaps, overlaps, and dependencies in the current system
• Improve coordination across regulatory bodies
• Provide greater clarity to industry on how AI is regulated

Through this work, the CAA will strengthen its ability to:

• Anticipate and respond to emerging AI developments
• Provide clear, consistent, and proportionate regulatory direction
• Support innovation while maintaining high standards of safety and consumer protection

A Mandatory Occurrence Report (MOR) is a required report about something that happened in aviation that could affect safety. People file MORs so the UK CAA and the aviation industry can spot patterns, learn what needs fixing, and act early to help prevent accidents.

Every month, the CAA gets tens of thousands of MORs. People have to quickly sort them, then add labels (codes) that describe what each report is about. This helps us group similar reports together so our safety experts can spot patterns and learn what might be going wrong.

We are testing whether AI can help with this sorting and labelling, so the team can do it faster and more accurately. This should help us build a better, more reliable set of safety information.

During summer 2025, CAA representatives worked with international regulators and industry at the EASA AI Conference, understanding EASA’s approach to regulating AI safety, and exploring common approaches to the safe and responsible use of AI in aviation for the benefit of passengers.

We have published our Consumer and AI Principles, setting out how people’s rights, fairness, and trust are protected as airlines and airports use AI. The guidance explains how our long‑standing consumer protections work alongside new AI principles, ensuring decisions that affect passengers remain safe, transparent, and open to challenge.

The CAA secured support through DSIT’s Regulatory Innovation Office (RIO) AI Capability Fund to explore a small number of practical AI use cases. This includes early work to see whether AI can help extract and organise information from air accident investigation reports to support safety analysis, and trials of AI tools (such as assistants and simulation approaches) in the Future of Flight programme to help teams review evidence for new drone operations more efficiently. These are exploratory pilots to test what is safe, useful and realistic to scale as part of our strategy for using AI within the CAA.

In November 2024, we launched our AI Strategy for aerospace, setting out how the UK CAA will both use AI to improve our own work and support the sector to adopt AI safely and responsibly. The strategy explains our priorities for safety and consumer protection, enabling innovation, providing clear guidance, and building capability—alongside our next steps for working with industry and partners as AI use accelerates across aviation.

We surveyed the sector in 2024 to gather insights on how we regulate AI, informing our AI Strategy. We are grateful for all the responses received and your support in helping us to create a strategy for the safe and secure use of AI in aviation. Read our summary of responses.