Trust AI like you trust planes—but only if we regulate it first

You board a plane and trust a system you can’t see. Pilots speak a language you don’t understand. Flight paths, air traffic control, maintenance logs—it all happens in the background. And that’s the point.

AI, on the other hand? It’s loud, chaotic, often unexplainable. We’re asked to trust it while being told to expect turbulence. There's no seatbelt sign. No cockpit. Just a blinking cursor, answering questions that feel a little too confident.

So here’s the tension: When something becomes part of daily life—like flying—we regulate it until it becomes quietly boring. When something is new and exciting—like AI—we let it run fast and loose. But what if we’re overdue for treating AI the way we treat air travel?

For most of us, AI is something we experience secondhand. It's the chatbot helping with a bank refund. The filter deciding what email matters. The recommendation that leads you to a product you didn’t know you needed. It lives in our phones, our feed, our search—and yet it doesn’t feel real. And that’s where the unease comes in.

We don't fear pilots, we fear pilot error. We don’t fear planes, we fear the lack of control. With AI, that fear is fuzzier. It's not just about errors—it's about opacity. There’s no checklist. No black box we can recover. Just probabilities, patterns, and a vibe. Regulation isn’t about stopping flight. It’s about agreeing on what keeps it in the air. We don’t need to ground AI—we just need to decide how it earns our trust.

Right now, AI is in the messy, fast-moving stage that aviation lived through in the early 20th century. Back then, barnstormers flew unlicensed. Planes crashed frequently. Public confidence was low. The skies were thrilling—but also terrifying.

Then came oversight. International standards. Pilot certification. Maintenance requirements. No one said, “Let’s ban planes.” They said: “Let’s make the sky safe.” With AI, we’re still in the barnstorming era. Companies race to build bigger, faster models. Regulators struggle to keep up. And the public? We’re all passengers on a flight that hasn’t filed a flight plan.

Airlines aren’t just regulated to avoid crashes. They’re regulated because of how they interact with lives—time, borders, families, safety. We don't allow pilots to freelance decision-making midair. We standardize. We enforce. So why do we allow AI systems to behave differently in every country, every app, every context? Why can an AI model make a medical recommendation in one country and a meme in another—without clearly telling you the difference?

Maybe it’s time to borrow aviation logic:

• Pre-flight check = AI model disclosure
• Pilot license = training data certification
• Air traffic control = centralized audit system
• Black box = explainability requirement
• Weather radar = bias prediction systems

Not because AI is dangerous, but because it’s becoming normal—and that’s when it needs guardrails most.

Some people argue that regulating AI too early will “stifle innovation.” But we don’t say that about air safety. Or food standards. Or elevators. There’s a quiet cultural shift when something becomes infrastructure. It stops being a novelty and starts being a system you rely on without thinking. The goal of regulation isn’t to slow it down. It’s to make it safe enough to speed up responsibly. We’re not trying to make AI boring. But we should be trying to make it dependable.

We trust planes because there’s a system of accountability beneath them. We trust them because the people who build, fly, and inspect them are held to a standard that doesn’t change just because the plane is new.

AI won’t earn our trust through slick UI or faster responses. It will earn trust when it disappears into our lives—and leaves us feeling supported, not manipulated. There’s a reason no one claps for a plane landing anymore. We expect it to work. Imagine that same quiet confidence applied to AI. Not awe. Not fear. Just… trust.

Most people don’t realize how much coordination goes into a single flight. Pilots and air traffic controllers communicate constantly. There are backup plans, altitude lanes, risk thresholds. No one decides to “just try a new route” mid-flight without notifying the tower. And yet, we let AI models generate medical advice, legal opinions, and school lesson plans with no audit trail or real-time oversight.

This isn’t about banning innovation. It’s about modeling responsibility. We already know how to regulate high-risk systems. We already have templates for safety, transparency, and cross-border coordination. We just need to admit that AI belongs in that category now.

If we do borrow from airline regulation, here are the principles we’d follow:

1. Certification before deployment. You don’t fly an aircraft without it passing mechanical checks. AI models should be certified for specific domains: education, finance, medicine, entertainment.
2. International coordination. Planes don’t stop being safe when they enter another country’s airspace. AI models should meet minimum standards everywhere—not just in tech-exporting countries.
3. Incident reporting. Aviation has protocols for near misses and mechanical failures. AI should too. When a chatbot hallucinated a court case, that should’ve triggered an industry-wide learning event.
4. Human-in-the-loop by design. Just as autopilot has limits, so should AI. There should always be clear off-ramps for human override and correction.
5. Redundancy and resilience. Systems should not fail catastrophically. If an AI decision system goes offline, there should be a fallback. A manual. A process.

This isn’t science fiction. It’s just good governance.

AI doesn’t just perform tasks. It interacts with your identity, your choices, your information. That makes regulation feel like a culture war—who decides what gets filtered, flagged, or recommended?

But remember: aviation regulation didn’t dictate where you fly. It made the experience safer no matter your destination. The same principle can apply to AI. We can preserve freedom while enforcing reliability. We can allow innovation without sacrificing public confidence.

We regulate flight because it affects how we live. AI is the same. It’s starting to shape our choices, our knowledge, our relationships. It deserves a system—not just an update. The next time an AI model answers your question or generates your itinerary, ask yourself: Would I want this tool flying my plane?

Not because AI is a plane. But because the stakes—trust, safety, freedom—are already airborne. And we deserve to land safely, every time.