Airports and airfields
Writing the shared rules of airfield autonomy, so every airport does not have to invent them alone.
Every airport approaching autonomy is currently answering the same questions from scratch. What counts as safe. Where a vehicle may operate. What evidence a vendor owes you. That duplicated effort is the single largest drag on the whole sector, and it is what the industry work exists to fix.
- Programs
- Airfield Autonomy Initiative, FLITE AGVS Task Force
- ARIBO role
- Operational and Safety Integration Team, Task Force co-chair
- Environment
- Airfields, industry-wide
- Status
- AAI completed 2025. Task Force active.
The Airfield Autonomy Initiative
ARIBO served as the Operational and Safety Integration Team for the Airfield Autonomy Initiative, the national effort to move autonomous ground vehicles onto the airfield in a way operators and regulators can both live with. The initiative completed in 2025.
The integration seat is the one that matters here. Plenty of parties can describe what the technology does. Far fewer can say what has to be true operationally, and what safety evidence has to exist, before an airport can authorize any of it. That was the work we held.
The FLITE AGVS Task Force
Corey co-chairs the FLITE AGVS Task Force, which sets shared direction for automated ground vehicle systems across the aviation industry.
A task force is where the sector agrees what good looks like: common expectations for operational domains, safety evidence and the vendor relationship, so that an airport in Atlanta and an airport in Denver are not writing incompatible requirements for the same vehicle.
Why we do industry work at all
It is not billable, and it is not marketing. We do it because the alternative is worse for our own clients.
If every operator writes its own rules, vendors optimize for whoever shouts loudest, evidence stays inconsistent, and the whole category moves slower. Shared standards of practice make each individual deployment cheaper and safer, including the ones we are paid to deliver.
It also means we are in the room when the direction gets set, rather than reading about it afterwards. That is worth something to the clients who hire us to see round the next corner.
If every airport writes its own rules from scratch, the whole sector moves at the speed of the slowest one.