Company
TrustFlight
Timeline
2023–2024
Role & Responsibilities
Lead Product Designer, Front-End Development
Disciplines
Information ArchitectureSearch Interface DesignSemantic RetrievalGrounded Generation
The Problem
It's 2 PM on a Tuesday. A flight operations manager needs to approve a crew roster change for tomorrow's transatlantic service. Before signing off, she needs to verify one thing: pilot rest requirements under EASA regulations for flights exceeding 10 hours.
She opens her bookmarks. Three PDFs: EASA Part-ORO, CAA UK CAP 371, and the company's operations manual. She Ctrl+F searches "rest requirements" in the EASA document. Forty-seven matches. She starts reading. Section headers, cross-references, definitions, but not the specific requirement she needs. She tries "flight duty period" instead. Sixty-two matches.
Twenty minutes later, she's cross-referencing EASA Part-ORO Section FTL.235, CAA UK guidance on "away from home base" rest, and her company's approved Flight Time Limitation Scheme. She's not looking for information. She's reconstructing regulatory logic from fragments scattered across three documents.
The Regulatory Stack
Aviation operators work under overlapping regulatory frameworks. EASA sets European standards. National authorities like CAA UK add interpretations. ICAO provides international baselines. Operator-specific approvals grant exemptions. Every question requires checking multiple sources because regulations reference each other, contradict each other, and update independently.
Operator-Specific Approvals & Exemptions
Custom duty periods, route-specific waivers, fleet authorizations
What you check first
CAA UK (National Interpretation)
CAP 371, national guidance, UK-specific requirements
National layer
EASA (European Standards)
Part-ORO, Part-FTL, hundreds of articles and annexes
Core framework
ICAO (International Baseline)
Annex 6, standards and recommended practices
Foundation layer
EASA Part-ORO defines the baseline: minimum rest away from home base must be "at least as long as the preceding duty period, or 10 hours, whichever is greater." But what counts as the preceding duty period? Post-flight duty counts. Does standby count? Depends on the type of standby and whether the crew member was called out. Does positioning count? Yes, but the time calculation differs from flight duty.
Each answer spawns new questions. Each question requires finding the relevant section, understanding its conditions and exceptions, then checking whether the company's approved Flight Time Limitation Scheme modifies the baseline. The regulations aren't hidden. They're fragmented.
This is what regulatory compliance looks like in aviation. Not broken. Not inefficient. Just fundamentally manual. Every crew change, every route approval, every schedule adjustment requires the same archaeological dig through layered regulatory frameworks. Operators don't work around this. They staff for it. They hire for it. They build institutional knowledge to handle it because when staying legal depends on correctly interpreting the interplay between EASA base requirements, national interpretations, and operator-specific approvals, there's no shortcut. The system works, but it extracts a tax in time, expertise, and risk.
The Solution
SmartRegs automates the reconstruction. It searches EASA, CAA, ICAO, and operator-specific documents in parallel, synthesizes the answer, and provides direct citations to every source.
We built two systems that work together as the regulatory intelligence layer for TrustFlight's compliance platform: a regulatory repository operators control, and an AI research agent that handles the cross-document research operators were doing manually.
The Regulatory Repository
The repository consolidates regulations from multiple verified sources into a single directory. Instead of bookmarking PDFs across EASA, CAA UK, ICAO, and operator approval documents, operators have one system that pulls from all sources and keeps them current.
Video 1.1 Consolidated access to EASA, CAA UK, ICAO regulations
Video 1.2 Navigate through subparts, sections, articles, guidance
Library Structure & Navigation
The repository preserves each regulation's official structure. EASA Part-ORO breaks down into Subparts (like FTL for flight time limitations), then Sections, then individual Articles (like Article 205 on flight duty periods). Each article links to its AMC (Acceptable Means of Compliance) and GM (Guidance Material). Operators can drill down through this hierarchy when they know exactly what they're looking for, or search globally across all subscribed regulations.
Video 1.3 Maintains official regulation hierarchy
Global & Contextual Search
Operators can search globally across all subscribed regulations or contextually within a specific regulation section. Query "crew rest requirements" globally and get ranked sections across EASA, CAA UK, and ICAO. Search contextually within EASA Part-ORO and see only results from that regulation. Both modes return direct excerpts from the source text.
Video 1.4 Search across regulations with direct linking
Version Tracking & Visual Diffs
Regulations update constantly. The system checks for changes daily. When EASA amends Part-ORO, it automatically pulls the new version and generates a visual diff: deleted text in red, added text in green, effective dates shown, amendment references linked. Operators see exactly what changed without manually comparing PDFs.
Video 1.5 Automated change detection and comparison
Personal Bookmarking System
Operators can bookmark any regulation, section, or individual article tied to their user profile. Flight operations managers bookmark frequently-referenced crew duty regulations. Maintenance teams save aircraft certification requirements. Training departments collect relevant licensing standards. Each user builds their own curated reference library of the regulations most critical to their role, accessible instantly from any search or browsing session.
Video 1.6 User libraries for frequently referenced sections
The AI Research Agent
The Repository helps when the intention is a direct lookup or a surgical search. But when a query spans multiple regulations, knowingly or not, lookup and search fall short.
When a flight operations manager needs to look up the maximum flight duty period for a crew operating a 3-sector day with an augmented crew configuration, they might know what to cross-reference. But add search, lookup, and comparison, and that's a time sink.
That's where the AI Research Agent really shines. Operators query the agent in natural language, and the agent starts a deep search across regulation levels, spanning parallel subagents to search across them, surfacing and synthesizing an answer that is properly grounded and cited.
Video 2.1 Complex questions spanning multiple regulations
Video 2.2 AI answers anchored to regulation sections with instant verification
The system handles multiple queries simultaneously without interference. One operator's complex research doesn't slow down another's quick lookup, and if one query fails, others continue unaffected. This isolation ensures operators can trust their research won't be delayed or disrupted by other activity on the system.
The language model generates answers using only the retrieved regulation text as context. It synthesizes information across multiple sections but cannot add information not present in the sources. If retrieved sections don't contain relevant information, the system says "I don't have enough information to answer this" rather than hallucinating requirements. Every claim in the answer links directly to the source regulation section. The citations aren't footnotes buried at the end. They're inline, attached to specific claims, one click away from verification.
Results & Impact
2–3min
Research Time
from 30–60 min
100%
Grounded
never hallucinates
~40%
Verification
click-through
Daily
Research
vs reactive
Research time dropped from 30-60 minutes to 2-3 minutes
Regulatory research that required opening multiple PDFs, keyword searching across documents, and cross-referencing sections now takes a single query. Operators get synthesized answers with inline citations, then click through to verify sources when needed.
The system never hallucinates
When the agent retrieves relevant sections, it synthesizes them accurately. When it doesn't find enough information, it says so. It doesn't invent requirements or cite regulations that don't exist. The limitation is retrieval, not accuracy. Occasionally operators need to rephrase queries to surface the right sections.
Operators verify ~40% of answers
Not because they distrust the system, but because they want full regulatory context for their specific scenario. This is exactly the behavior we want. SmartRegs makes verification instant instead of requiring manual PDF archaeology. Compliance officers trust the system precisely because checking sources is easy.
Research became routine instead of reactive
Operators now ask questions they previously wouldn't have bothered with. Complex queries like "What's the exact wording EASA uses for pre-flight fuel calculations so we can match it in our ops manual" or "Did the recent amendment to Part-ORO change anything about our standby duty definitions?" used to get deferred until audit time because the manual effort wasn't worth it. When research takes 2 minutes, it becomes part of daily planning instead of a last-resort activity.
What We Learned
Operators were spending 30-60 minutes hunting through PDFs for answers. We made it take 2 minutes. The system worked, but production revealed where we could push further.
Speed remains an ongoing challenge for queries requiring deep parallel traversal across multiple regulatory sources. Training the system to understand how operators phrase questions versus how regulations are written is continuous work.
The real power emerged when SmartRegs became the regulatory foundation for the entire platform. When operators write operational manuals, they need to reference exact regulatory text and track when those regulations change. SmartRegs made that possible. What started as a research tool became the regulatory intelligence layer that powers document authoring, compliance tracking, and everything else operators build on top of it. The next case study explores how we turned that foundation into a complete authoring system for compliance-critical documentation.
Next Case Study
Structured Aviation Authoring
Complete lifecycle management for compliance-critical documentation.