Airlines look to cut time spent on the tarmac

Please read the article. They are talking about an improvement over existing algorithms by using quantum computing.

Right:

The system uses machine learning to assign arriving aircraft to the nearest available gate with the shortest taxi time.

Just to make extra money you mean

I know "rich" means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but "paying for priority boarding" should not be included in a reasonable definition of the word.

LLMs and generative AI aren't going to be any good on this problem. The article is using the older, non-buzzword computer science meaning, which includes algorithms for this exact problem, such as the ones used for a category of difficult problems known as constraint satisfaction problems. These problems were artificial intelligence problems before the term "AI" was turned into a marketing buzzword.

Allocating gates is one problem that traditional computers and algorithms struggle to do quickly, with calculation times increasing disproportionately to the size of the problem.

But, Dr Doetsch is confident that approaches using quantum computing will crush the problem.

"Quantum algorithms will allow optimally assigning gates, and other resources, even in large airports and travel networks. These algorithms will be able to respond to changing external factors with updated optimal solutions in real time," he says.

This stuff is cool, and has nothing to do with generative AI.

Why do you think this is going to replace air traffic control work? It's picking which gate to park the plane at. This was done by airline and airport operations teams, not ATC. Imagine if you could automatically pick gates to reduce the time a plane spends taxiing and/or minimize time passengers spend walking. That's 100% a useful application for computer optimization algorithms. Humans aren't going to do that better and it's not a function of safety that tower or ground control needs to do.

I feel like ATC is one of those pattern-recognition constraint-satisfaction problem jobs where a (non-generative!) algorithm can probably do a pretty good job.