This Week in GA: AI at BACE 2026

The nearly weeklong event that is NBAA-BACE shifts focus from year to year as its main aircraft manufacturing exhibitors ebb and flow depending on where they are in product debut and delivery. And with the exception of the SyberJet SJ36 mockup’s unveiling, airframe announcements were thin on the ground. Gulfstream brought a full lineup—including a G400 flight test article—and Dassault featured its Falcon 6X and 8X while the latest 10X took flight back in France. Textron Aviation showed off its current stable, though we still haven’t seen the CJ3 Gen3 in person. Embraer stayed home—it too is in the “deliver” phase of the latest Phenom 100EX and 300E without a pressing need to parade them in front of more prospects, I suppose.

So it came down to another movement in the business aviation market, towards the thoughtful application of AI agents within our industry, to steal the show, in my mind.

The live demonstration of WingX’s agentic AI solution tapped into airport data during the F1 races in Vegas last year. [Credit: Julie Boatman]

WingX’s Live Demo

Resting on the repository of information that Jetnet has built over its decades of gathering, parsing, and analyzing business aircraft sales and operations, WingX now leverages that proprietary data to construct several new AI agents that propose to both streamline flight department operations and inform aircraft transactions and budgeting. We’re moving from the dashboard era to the agent era, Christoph Kohler, founder and managing director of WingX, said in the company’s press conference at BACE.

Kohler gave a live demonstration of several applications of those agents during the presentation, each seeking to answer the questions: “Where is the demand?”, “Where is the money spent?”, and “Who is behind it?” Leveraging more than 15 years of data history—and growing—those answers refine themselves continuously, given that the agents stay in that sandbox of known reliable data.

First, using the BACE event as a contemporaneous example, he looked at the question, “How many aircraft are on the ground at the three main airports, LAS, HND, and VGT?” and how does that differ year-over-year from previous events? In essence, is there a bump caused by BACE? Next, he applied the same to the F1 race that has taken place on the Strip in Vegas for the last three years. Again, is there a noticeable effect? Is that traffic footprint growing, what is its makeup, and how can either FBOs and other customers plan for that knock-on effect, or brokers look at what prospects might be in play?

The demonstration of Jeppesen ForeFlight’s Airflow Trip Feasibility agent gave an example of how the company has applied five core concepts to its adoption of AI tools. [Credit: Julie Boatman]

Jepp’s Airflow

Reggie Arsenault, SVP of flight operations for Jeppesen ForeFlight, has his roots in general aviation and a long tenure at the Centennial, Colorado-based company—back to 1998, essentially.

Arsenault credits Jeppesen ForeFlight CEO Brad Surek with much of the inspiration—and long-term big-picture thinking—for Airflow. “A lot of the underlying foundations or principles that are in this, he’s been working on for over a decade,” said Arsenault. “It’s just been something that he’s been thinking about for a long time…[asking] how do you create the context graph and the ontology that maps aviation?”

The five guiding principles struck me as particularly cogent. “It’s the core of how you bring AI in,” said Arsenault. “One of them is the context graph, so you can’t have these agents or technology basing their workflow on non-aviation [data], or what’s out there on the web. Second is certified data. Obviously, Jeppesen has a fair amount of that. And so it’s really ensuring that we’re using certified data to provide the correct and accurate answers. Number three is called the ‘why-chain.’ We believe that the recommendations and conclusions that AI brings… it needs to show the work…and how it got to that recommendation and we need to be able to have humans look at that to make sure it’s accurate. Number four is SMS; we know SMS is core to our industry, and so we’ve put in a lot of the principles around SMS into the platform itself directly, and we continue to expand on that. The fifth is having the human in the loop, so ensuring that we have the appropriate ways that human judgment is inserted to really ensure that.”

Airflow will be applied enterprise-wide in ways that the company is just starting to tap into. The platform lends itself to operators and users who want to directly build agents with Jepp, or build their own agents. “But you also see the capabilities show up in our existing products,” said Arsenault. “An example is NOTAMs. We already have that using AI to provide a very concise view of what the NOTAMs are, particular to your flight. So it’s going to show up in ForeFlight Mobile and some of our solutions in that way.”

That’s just one example, as Airflow will integrate as a key part of Jepp’s tech stack. You can see it today in two agents debuted at the show, Trip Feasibility and Ops Briefing.

Though there are plenty of sketchy AI agents and their developers out there, because both WingX and Jeppesen ForeFlight are playing in the well-defined sandboxes of their own data environments, the AI applications they unveiled feel less like a strange new world, and more like an innovative and critical next stage for the industry.

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