Ben Katz

speaker

144 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 3d ago

Ben Katz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

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WSJ What’s News · Flying Into the Future: How Will AI Reshape the Aviation Industry? · 26 Jul 2026 podcast

And that, again, to go back to eVTOLs, that is one of the massive hurdles in front of them is how do we certify a new type of aircraft?

I think it's difficult to underplay how important this element is.

It's something that Airbus has been actually talking about a lot in the last couple of years when they're thinking about their successor to what's known as the A320.

That's their best-selling narrowbody aircraft that competes with the 737.

Effectively, the industry is expecting this massive boom.

Aviation is growing.

It's projected to continue growing.

And we simply cannot build aircraft fast enough.

Airbus says that so much of the efficiencies that will come in the next generation single-aisle aircraft will be simply on the factory floor, shifting from a model where we build one aircraft at a time and it goes relatively slowly through the production line to more of a Ford-style car manufacturing facility where we can be producing really at scale.

This, again, is a really promising area.

But I think the more interesting thing is on the diagnosis of problems.

You're looking at huge amounts of engine data, of airframe data, and having an AI being able to see, oh, there was a little blip.

at this point in flight, and I can reference that to an incident that happened six years ago in this part of the world, et cetera, et cetera, that's where I see it happening.

And once again, regulators sign off on their confidence in AI systems to do those diagnoses, that's the thing that frees up the human beings because the humans can then come in, confirm if the diagnosis is accurate, and then take action.

You've picked up on two, at least two, kind of really critical points.

But, you know, the first one, just to address the pilot shortage, I mean, pilot institutions, the academies are really, really struggling to keep up.

Airlines have been begging the schools to help them get more pilots out and into the cockpits.

You know, since the pandemic, when we saw so many retirements across the industry, we've seen these airlines park up planes, cancel specific regional routes that they're flying, simply because they don't have enough people.

If we can make the process more efficient of getting a pilot flying,

through the training procedure, that would go a huge way towards kind of filling that gap.

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