USAF selects Tamr to automate aircraft configuration evaluations

US Air Force SEEK EAGLE Office (AFSEO) has selected US-based Tamr to accelerate and automate flight certification recommendations process for new flight configurations.

The five-year contract has a total ceiling value of $60m.

AFSEO verifies safe flight operating conditions for aircraft loaded with new stores comprising sensors, weapons, electronic warfare (EW) pods and new configurations.

With over three decades of aircraft performance studies, AFSEO holds substantial data to be tapped for the evaluation process of new configurations.

However, over time this data has been dispersed and siloed, restricting AFSEO’s ability to use it to certify new stores.

AFSEO has selected Tamr to use its machine learning software to mine technical content from historical documents and identify relevant antecedents to support the engineering decisions to safeguard pilots and aircraft.

With the help of Tamr, AFSEO will be able to predict if a configuration is safe based on previously approved configurations.

This contract would lead to increased ROI and utilisation of existing airforce aircraft, increased efficiency of AFSEO engineers and analysts, and savings in average time per request.

Furthermore, more than 60,000 historical documents will be tagged that will allow analysts to find relevant studies faster.

Tamr Government Solutions lead Mike Gormley said: “AFSEO performs difficult tasks to deliver a very important capability to current and future generations of aircraft.

“This contract demonstrates their confidence in Tamr to improve the organisation’s current throughput and agility for future mission requirements.”

The contract award follows the conclusion of a 20-month prototype with the DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit.