When people and computers interact, it’s usually a given that the computer serves as an aide while the human acts as a supervisor. With automation appearing more and more across daily life—including in air—that division of labor could soon shift. Tasks we think of as belonging to humans may soon be taken over by computers, and there could be consequences to that shift that haven’t yet been imagined. Automation can take specific tasks out of human hands, but automation can also make it more complex and more difficult for a human to act as supervisor.

For example, an airplane flying at 30,000 feet may be on autopilot, but the human pilot is ready to take over. During an average flight, a human pilot is manually flying for just two to seven minutes, while for the rest of that time, pilots are managing the aircraft’s flight. They are watching outside, talking with air traffic control, and communicating with personnel from their airline, all while being on-call for those two to seven minutes.

Automation is a moving target because it goes with our presumption of what is ascribed to the human. As vehicles of all kinds gain automation, the traditional architecture of how humans and computers interact may get muddy. Fundamental questions need to be addressed, such as: Are humans still expected to be supervisors? As we near full automation, does the ultimate responsibility for what happens in an airplane still lie with the human operator?

SPEAKER: Amy Pritchett, Head, Aerospace Engineering Department Pennsylvania State University

NASA’s Advanced Aircraft Concepts for Environmental Sustainability (AACES) 2050 contract predicted future scenarios, prioritized technologies, and conceptualized commercial airplanes for 2050. This presentation briefly summarizes the airplanes that were examined by the Aurora / Boeing team and showed their relative performance.

SPEAKER: Aaron Kutzmann, NASA AACES Aurora Chief Engineer, Associate Technical Fellow – Integrated Vehicle Systems

Every computational fluid dynamics engineer knows the frustration of slow, inconsistent mesh generation, where two engineers running the same simulation can end up with different results. Now there’s a solution. AFid is a machine vision plug-in that automates feature recognition and mesh spacing with zero training datasets. Validated on a Boeing 737 study, it reduces hours of manual clicking to seconds, delivering a 720x execution speedup while building a fully traceable digital audit trail. This talk showed how it solves a common engineering problem—and fits straight into existing workflows.

SPEAKERS: Lee Sanders; Founder; Fluid Dynamic Sciences LLC Max Kopacz; Lead Developer; Fluid Dynamic Sciences LLC

NASA’s aeronautics programs are shaping the future of U.S. aviation by pioneering high-speed flight, transforming airframes and propulsion, automating airspace and safety management capabilities, and revolutionizing engineering methods. This session offered a look at the strategic direction and top priorities of NASA to ensure the United States remains at the forefront of aviation innovation.

MODERATOR: Marjorie Censer, Editor-in-Chief, Aerospace America
SPEAKERS: Bob Pearce, NASA Nateri Madavan, NASA Parimal Kopardekar, NASA Kate McMurtry, NASA John Cavolowsky, NASA Lori Arnett, NASA

Significant progress has been made to mature underlying technologies to enable aircraft electrification, but how big is the remaining gap separating us from full implementation of the promising technologies? This session looked back at significant advances by NASA and aviation industry leaders and looked forward to remaining challenges.

SPEAKERS: Parker Vascik, Director of Product Strategy, Electra.aero Paul Comtois, Head of Training Design, Advanced Air Mobility, CAE Jeff Freeman, Director of Business Development, ESAero Ben Loxton, Vice President, magniX Gaudy Bezos-O’Connor, Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstration, Integrated Aviation Systems Program, Project Manager, NASA Vincent P Schultz, Revolutionary Aerospace LLC

New high-speed flight concepts are about to reshape global mobility, drawing on the AIAA High-Speed Flight Task Force’s recent cross-community work on civil flight beyond Mach 1. Building from their recommendations to integrate technical, economic, environmental, and regulatory perspectives, this panel connected supersonic, hypersonic, and suborbital point-to-point concepts into a coherent roadmap for future transport systems.

SPEAKERS: Bimal Aponso, FAA Kevin Bowcutt, Boeing Peter Coen, NASA David Lazzara, Boom Supersonic Florian Linke, DLR Todd Magee, Boeing Jess Sponable, New Frontier Aerospace, Inc.

Boom Supersonic Founder and CEO Blake Scholl shared the behind-the-scenes story of building the first independently developed supersonic jet, solving sonic boom, and the path toward bringing back supersonic passenger flight.

Scholl also accepted the 2026 AIAA Reed Aeronautics Award, the highest honor by the Institute recognizing achievements in aeronautics.

Is the traditional acquisition process stifling critical innovation in aviation?

A distinguished panel of senior leaders from across the Department of Defense explored collaborative strategies for accelerating the development and deployment of next-generation aviation technologies at a better cost to the taxpayer.

Vice Adm. Doug “V8” Verissimo charged the AIAA community to build reliability, safety, and right‑to‑repair into the next generation of airpower during his plenary remarks on the third day of the AIAA AVIATION Forum 2026.

SPEAKER: Vice Adm. Doug “V8” Verissimo Commander, Naval Air Forces Commander, Naval Air Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet U.S. Navy

The drive toward sustainable aviation depends on the rapid progress in new technologies, yet certification remains one of the most significant obstacles to timely deployment. Emerging propulsion systems, alternative energy sources, and unconventional aircraft architectures do not fit naturally within today’s regulatory framework. Many companies and start-ups developing sustainable aviation solutions have already encountered delays as they face unfamiliar failure modes, limited certification precedents, and a regulatory landscape that has not fully adapted to these innovations. The urgency of global climate goals creates pressure to bring these technologies to market without compromising safety.

Experts from certification offices, industry, start-ups, investors, and policy discussed the current state of certification readiness for sustainable aviation and identify ways to accelerate the certification process, while looking at challenges, lessons learned, and emerging strategies needed to support the faster and safer certification of next-generation technologies.

The future of air dominance will be defined by how manned and unmanned platforms collaborate across domains.

This session explored emerging Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) concepts and their role in shaping next-generation air operations. Experts discussed cutting-edge testing protocols, rapid experimentation frameworks, and integration pathways to bring CCA capabilities from design to deployment. Participants gained insight into how CCAs will be operationalized within current and future force structures, ensuring mission resilience, combat adaptability, and enhanced decision speed in contested environments.

Lockheed Martin Skunk Works® has been leading a project called Dragonfly to design and build an unmanned aircraft using an advanced manufacturing process called additive manufacturing. Lockheed Martin partnered with Divergent, a company that has developed a novel approach to additive manufacturing of automotive and aerospace structures, to rapidly design and build an aluminum airframe for an unmanned aircraft. In this presentation, Juan Montoro shared highlights and lessons learned from the project.

SPEAKERS: Juan Montoro, Lockheed Martin; Alex Brookshire, Lockheed Martin; Cooper Keller, Divergent

FAA Deputy Administrator Chris Rocheleau and NASA Senior Advisor Todd Ericson had a forward-looking discussion on the future of aviation with Todd Citron, CTO, Boeing (retired). They discussed how federal leadership is advancing innovation, ensuring safety, and shaping the next generation of airspace and aerospace collaboration.

Advanced analytics and automation are reshaping aerospace operations across commercial, defense, and low altitude fleets, while raising critical technical, safety, and regulatory issues. This session addressed the following:

Integration of digital workflows for strategic traffic management and operator coordination
*Technical and regulatory challenges in enabling autonomous taxi, approach, and landing across diverse airspace classes
*Assurance frameworks for certifiability, transparency, and trust in safety-critical AI systems
*Secure interoperability with legacy ATC systems and scalable evidence pipelines for accelerated validation
*Preparing for degraded conditions and GNSS disruptions to ensure continuity and resilience
*Integrated Autonomy: Hazard detection, contingency management, and ATC integration for autonomous ops
*Advanced Assurance: Runtime architectures and model-based pipelines for certifying autonomy at scale

A new PBS documentary that tells the story of the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft and its team of operators will air in 2027 in line with the 50th anniversary of Voyager I/II missions.

This session featured a discussion with the producers, Voyager team members, and other high-profile experts. Additionally, this is a celebration of the “Light Day” distance from Earth that Voyager will achieve in November.

SPEAKERS: Co-Directors: Adam and Kara White; Ravi Chaudhary, Former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force; Phil Hoffman, Executive Producer

AI doesn’t replace human ingenuity—it amplifies it, accelerating workflows so humans can make the next great leap in aviation faster.

Lockheed Martin’s Renee Pasman delivered the Plenary Session on the second day of the AIAA AVIATION Forum 2026. She went on to describe that while AI can compress design cycles and experience from years into weeks, days, hours, or even minutes, groundbreaking aviation platforms like the F-35 Lightning II still require human creativity, innovation and leadership. AI becomes a force multiplier when thoughtfully integrated into workflows, enabling humans to iterate rapidly toward solutions that AI alone can’t envision.

SPEAKER: Renee Pasman Vice President, Chief Information Officer and Digital Transformation Executive Lockheed Martin Aeronautics

In this thought-provoking session, the panel took a clear-eyed look at how AI is impacting design today—and where it’s headed next.

Moving beyond buzzwords, they discussed the real challenges in applying AI to product design, such as balancing speed, accuracy, and creative control. They explored how to use large language models (LLMs) intelligently as part of a broader toolkit, while focusing on delivering tangible products. The discussion highlighted lessons learned, practical strategies for building data-driven design tools, and predictions on where informed, purposeful AI integration will make the biggest difference.

MODERATOR: Tracy Elving, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
SPEAKERS: Ella Atkins, Virginia Tech; Jeff Allred, RTX; Pooja Narayan, Airbus

The 2026 Daniel Guggenheim Medal was awarded to Dr. Charbel Farhat of Stanford University for pioneering advances in the computational mechanics of fluid–structure interaction, which transformed simulation methodologies and enabled major breakthroughs in aircraft design and optimization.

The Guggenheim Medal is jointly sponsored by AIAA, ASME, SAE International, and the Vertical Flight Society. The Medal was established in 1929 to honor innovators who make notable achievements in the advancement of aeronautics. Its first recipient was Orville Wright.

Other recipients are some of the greatest names in aerospace, including: William Boeing, James Doolittle, Donald Douglas, Hugh Dryden, Robert Goddard, Charles Lindbergh, Glenn Martin, Burt Rutan, Igor Sikorsky, and most recently, Stephen Tsai. Congratulations!

Where is aviation headed next and how do we get there faster, smarter, and more responsibly.

The panel explored the next big opportunities in aviation—from sustainable operations and advanced autonomy to increasingly integrated digital ecosystems—and examined what it will truly take to turn these ambitions into reality. Drawing on recent big bets that both succeeded and failed, the discussion focused on how to identify the right problems, de-risk innovation, and avoid chasing hype at the expense of long-term value. Throughout, they emphasized making ethical decisions at each step of the lifecycle, ensuring that safety, equity, privacy, and environmental responsibility stay at the center of rapid technological change.

MODERATOR: Graham Warwick, Aviation Week
SPEAKERS: Adam Shepherd, Northrop Grumman; Craig Martell, Lockheed Martin; Robert Gregg, Boeing; Marc Fischer, Airbus; Scott Lasusky, RTX; John Cavolowsky, NASA; Venke Sanakran, AFRL

Embraer’s Maurílio Albanese Novaes, Jr., explored the aircraft configurations Embraer envisions as potential breakthroughs, the strength of the collaborative innovation ecosystem Embraer has built, and the evolving skill sets the company foresees as essential for its engineers—and how they are preparing them to meet those demands. Maurílio challenged the audience to push boundaries, foster innovation, and elevate people excellence in aeronautics.

The aerospace engineering role is being reshaped by AI, pervasive digital threads, and increasingly integrated test and operations environments.

This panel explored the evolving mix of skills engineers need—systems thinking, software and data fluency, model-based methods, and cross-domain collaboration—to thrive in a world of digital twins, advanced automation, and rapid iteration.

MODERATOR: Paige Stanton Wilson, Chief Development Officer, Acubed
SPEAKERS: Jeremy Roehm, Chief of Technology & Partnerships, Rolls-Royce; Dimitri Mavris, Director of Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory, Georgia Tech; Prajwal Shiva Prakasha, Group Lead – Aviation System Design & Assessment, DLR; Carlos Cesnik, Professor of Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan; Clint Church, Interim President & CEO, Aurora Flight Sciences; Laura Bogusch, Vice President, Digital and Systems Engineering, Boeing

This panel dove into how the emerging ecosystem of connected data and high-fidelity virtual representations can link requirements, design, manufacturing, ground test, flight test, and in-service operations into a continuous learning loop. They highlighted how advances in physics-based modeling, model-based systems engineering, and integrated test environments enable earlier discovery of issues, smarter test campaigns, and rapid design iteration with higher confidence. They focused on what must change—in tools, processes, culture, and validation approaches—to realize these methods at scale and unlock step-change gains in speed, cost, and technical risk reduction.

MODERATOR: Andy Bernhard, Lockheed Martin
SPEAKERS: Kelley Hashemi, NASA; Darcy Allison, Anduril; Josh Deaton, AFRL; Bjorn Nagel, DLR

AIAA CEO Clay Mowry welcomed the crowd to AVIATION Forum 2026 on Monday, 8 June, in San Diego “Today I want to focus on speed. Speed has always been embedded in aerospace culture. From breaking the sound barrier, to reaching the Moon, to compressing design timelines – this industry has always pursued what once seemed impossible. Our ability to move with urgency, collaboration, and technical excellence will define the next era of aerospace. What once took decades is now happening in years, sometimes months. The challenges ahead are too important, the opportunities too significant, and the competition too intense for us to move at yesterday’s pace. This industry is being called to think differently. To collaborate differently. And in many ways to lead differently. That is why the AIAA community today matters more than ever.”

• Clay Mowry