AISBA 2026 · Attendee resource
The AI Preflight Checklist
An operator’s companion to the session “Same Authority, New Participant.” A preflight is run on equipment already in service, before you let it fly today. This page works the same way.
01 Start with the two-sentence test
Pick one place AI already participates in your operation. Something someone on your team used this week. Write down two sentences: who is accountable for the output if it turns out to be wrong, and what that tool is not permitted to conclude on its own. If those sentences are hard to write, you have found the real project, and it has nothing to do with buying software.
02 Your operation
Three questions about your own operation
- Where may AI participate, in writing? Not a values statement. Named decisions, named boundaries.
- Who approved each connection between an AI account and your operational systems, and would your Director of Operations recognize the list?
- For anything read-only, who validates the answers before they shape a decision? Even a wrong answer nobody acted on has already shaped judgment.
03 Any vendor
Five questions for any vendor
- Does the AI hold a named identity in your system, or does it act on a shared credential?
- Can we scope what it may read and what it may change, per tool, per role?
- What is captured when it acts, and can we reconstruct who did what afterward?
- Can we block a write before it executes, or only discover it after?
- Who at our company approved this connection, and where is that written down?
04 Memory items
Approvals do not transfer. A tool can arrive proven. It can even arrive proven inside another operator’s authorization. What no tool can arrive with is yours. Your operation must establish the authority and controls for its intended use. Where FAA approval or acceptance is required, it is earned with your processes, in front of your own inspector. Some operations will be able to articulate how a new participant works inside their authority. Some will not.
The habit this industry already owns. Aviation has absorbed new participants before. Authority named. Scope defined. Training completed, competence checked, actions recorded. AI deserves exactly that treatment, and nobody has to invent anything to give it. You just have to write it down.
The work of writing it down is Operational Decision Architecture. The record it produces is Operational Decision Provenance.
Prefer it on paper? Download the printable sheet (PDF).
Ran the two-sentence test and found the real project? The free AI Readiness Survey takes ten minutes and shows where AI exposure, authority gaps, and decision-capture risk already exist in your operation.
Take the Survey