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Threat Board: How AeroCopilot Surfaces Risks

The Threat Board filters TFRs, SIGMETs, smoke, AQI, and space weather to your route corridor, then renders structured threat cards and a decision banner.

Threat Board: How AeroCopilot Surfaces Risks

The Threat Board is the first decision surface in the briefing. It answers a single question: what is dangerous along the route I am about to fly, right now? Instead of dumping every NOTAM, TFR, and SIGMET in the national airspace, it geofilters to your corridor and ranks what matters.

What feeds the board

The Threat Board pulls from active hazard datasets the platform tracks across the dashboard and the map, including:

  • TFRs (VIP, sporting, hazards, security types per 14 CFR 91.137-145)
  • SIGMETs and convective SIGMETs
  • Smoke plumes from active wildfires
  • Air Quality Index data
  • Space weather alerts from NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (GPS / WAAS impact)
  • PIREPs in vicinity (turbulence, icing)

NOTAMs are handled in their own briefing section with a relevance filter (Critical / Relevant / Informational) and dedup logic — the Threat Board focuses on dynamic hazards, not chart-publication NOTAMs.

Route corridor filtering

A naive briefing shows every TFR in the country. The Threat Board applies a 20 NM corridor filter to your route and silences the rest, with explicit transparency text noting how many additional hazards are active elsewhere. This keeps the board scannable without hiding the existence of off-route activity.

The Hazard Route Filter AI is the deeper layer underneath: it asks whether each remaining hazard actually intersects your specific flight (altitude, time window, aircraft category) rather than just your lat/lon line.

Threat cards

Each surviving threat is rendered as a structured card. A card carries:

  • A type badge (TFR / SIGMET / smoke / AQI / space weather / PIREP)
  • A severity color
  • The hazard's identifier (NOTAM ID for TFRs)
  • The affected area (city, state)
  • The altitude band (with explicit SFC and UNL fallbacks where the source omits a number)
  • The effective Zulu window
  • The plain-language description

The TFR display path was hardened during the briefing audit so it no longer falls back to the literal placeholder string HAZARDS. SIGMET altitudes round correctly across SFC / UNL / sub-FL180 / ≥FL180 cases instead of producing NaN.

Decision banner

Above the cards sits the threat decision banner — a roll-up of the route's overall threat posture. It does not replace the Ops Authority Panel verdict, but it lets you see at a glance whether the route is clean, has advisory activity, or has a hard blocker (active route TFR, convective SIGMET on path, etc.).

How the board interacts with downstream gates

The Threat Board is informational and structural — it organizes hazards. The actual gating happens later:

  1. A weather hazard that creates a forecast IFR or TS window during your ETD will trigger the Risk Window Gate.
  2. A pilot, aircraft, environment, or external factor flagged on the board can be marked on the FRAT assessment, where it is scored.
  3. Both feed the Ops Authority Panel, which produces the final CLEARED / HOLD / NO-GO verdict.

Threats you read here should reappear, weighted, in those later modules. If a threat affects your route and you skip it on the FRAT, the Ops Authority verdict will not see it.

Always-free safety layers

Two AI safety predictors run independently of the threat board and are unmetered on every tier:

  • VFR-IMC Predictor — forecast probability of a VFR-to-IMC transition.
  • Scud Running Alert — pattern detection for low-altitude VFR-into-IMC risk.

If either fires while you are reviewing the board, treat it as a hard input to the Risk Window Gate, not background noise.