Learning to Land Anywhere: Transferable Generative Models for Aircraft Trajectories

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that transfer learning with generative models can effectively produce realistic aircraft trajectories at data-scarce airports, reducing data needs and enabling better air traffic management simulations.

Contribution

It introduces transfer learning techniques for diffusion and flow-matching generative models to adapt from data-rich to data-scarce airports in aviation.

Findings

Diffusion models perform well with as little as 5% of local data.

Models reach baseline performance with around 20% of local data.

Transfer learning significantly outperforms models trained from scratch.

Abstract

Access to trajectory data is a key requirement for developing and validating Air Traffic Management (ATM) solutions, yet many secondary and regional airports face severe data scarcity. This limits the applicability of machine learning methods and the ability to perform large-scale simulations or "what-if" analyses. In this paper, we investigate whether generative models trained on data-rich airports can be efficiently adapted to data-scarce airports using transfer learning. We adapt state-of-the-art diffusion- and flow-matching-based architectures to the aviation domain and evaluate their transferability between Zurich (source) and Dublin (target) landing trajectory datasets. Models are pretrained on Zurich and fine-tuned on Dublin with varying amounts of local data, ranging from 0% to 100%. Results show that diffusion-based models achieve competitive performance with as little as 5% of the Dublin data and reach baseline-level performance around 20%, consistently outperforming models trained from scratch across metrics and visual inspections. Latent flow matching and latent diffusion models also benefit from pretraining, though with more variable gains, while flow matching models show weaker generalization. Despite challenges in capturing rare trajectory patterns, these findings demonstrate the potential of transfer learning to substantially reduce data requirements for trajectory generation in ATM, enabling realistic synthetic data generation even in environments with limited historical records.