When you hit unexpected turbulence or icing in the flight levels today, the information usually moves by short radio calls between pilots and ATC, then disappears into audio recordings. There is no shared, map-based picture of where those conditions are building, how severe they are, or how they evolve over time.
Congratulations to inventors Mitchell Daniels Jr. and Robert Handley III on U.S. Patent 12,494,131, issued today (December 9, 2025), for “Quantitative Visual Translation of Aircraft Radio Communications.
”This patent covers systems that continuously listen to pilot radio reports, convert the speech into structured data, correlate those reports with contemporaneous ADS-B position, altitude, heading, and speed, and then generate quantitative visual products like heatmaps of turbulence, icing, wind shear, and other reported conditions. The result is a spatial, data-driven view of in-flight hazards built directly from operational radio traffic, for use by controllers, pilots, FAA, and other aviation stakeholders.
Proud that our Trenam Law patent team, including Anton Hopen and Kari McDermott, helped AerLogics move this from concept to allowance and now to issue.
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