# Language Conditioning Improves Accuracy of Aircraft Goal Prediction in Non-Towered Airspace

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14063 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14063/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Towards Automated Air Traffic Safety Assessment Around Non-Towered Airports Using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12332/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous aircraft must safely operate in non-towered airspace, where coordination relies on voice-based communication among human pilots. Safe operation requires an aircraft to predict the intent, and corresponding goal location, of other aircraft. This paper introduces a multimodal framework for aircraft goal prediction that integrates natural language understanding with spatial reasoning to improve autonomous decision-making in such environments. We leverage automatic speech recognition and large language models to transcribe and interpret pilot radio calls, identify aircraft, and extract discrete intent labels. These intent labels are fused with observed trajectories to condition a temporal convolutional network and Gaussian mixture model for probabilistic goal prediction. Our method significantly reduces goal prediction error compared to baselines that rely solely on motion history, demonstrating that language-conditioned prediction increases prediction accuracy. Experiments on a real-world dataset from a non-towered airport validate the approach and highlight its potential to enable socially aware, language-conditioned robotic motion planning.