Ryan Graves and Michael Lembeck Ph.D outline pilot reporting barriers and technical detection infrastructure in data-driven forum

Americans for Safe Aerospace (ASA) founder and executive director Ryan Graves joined Michael Lembeck Ph.D, Chief Technical Officer at StarSense Innovations and leader of the 

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) UAP Integration and Outreach Committee

on February 7-8. The two-day virtual conference brought together over 300 attendees from aerospace, aviation safety, sensing and tracking, systems engineering, emergency management, and public policy sectors.

Graves and Lembeck presented Aviation Safety and Pilot Reporting, focusing on operational realities pilots face when encountering unidentified objects in controlled airspace and the technical infrastructure needed to validate and analyze their reports.

Graves opened with direct testimony about the culture of silence that continues to suppress aviation safety reporting. "Many of the same stigma and issues that I had as a pilot in 2013 are issues that pilots are still having here now in 2025, 2026," Graves told attendees.

He detailed a recent case from South Africa involving a commercial 737 pilot with over 15,000 flight hours. Climbing through 29,000 feet, both the pilot and co-pilot observed a large black triangle, approximately three-quarters the size of their aircraft, pass directly over their fully loaded passenger jet at an estimated 200 feet separation.

For context, Graves noted that fighter pilots maintain a 500-foot safety bubble during training dogfights. "To have a black triangle about three-quarters the size of a 737 fly within 200 feet, carrying hundreds of passengers, you can imagine just how startling an experience that must have been."

The aircrew reported the incident to air traffic control and checked their Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS). Neither showed any indication of the object. With no sensor corroboration for what they both witnessed, the pilots were left questioning their own perception to the point of self-administering drug tests.

Institutional Barriers at Leadership Level

The South Africa case revealed a critical new barrier in the reporting chain. After wrestling with the encounter for a week and a half, the pilot reported the incident to his airline's chief pilot. The chief pilot's immediate reaction upon learning the flight number was concern that his wife had been on that aircraft and had narrowly missed a potential catastrophe.

Despite this personal stake and the clear aviation safety implications, no formal hazard report was filed. No communication was sent to other pilots in the organization. The conversation simply ended.

"This right here is where we are at the state of affairs today," Graves said. "We see now that there's this institutional barrier at the leadership level within these organizations that are preventing a true conglomeration and understanding and mitigation of these instances."

Graves connected this pattern to the concept of "standardization of deviance," the normalization of risk factors that preceded the Challenger disaster. "We do have cases where this deviancy is right on the cusp of a catastrophic error," he warned.

Building Technical Infrastructure for Validation

Michael Lembeck presented the hardware and sensor development work underway within the AIAA UAP Integration and Outreach Committee's Hardware Factors Group, led by physicist Rex Groves. The committee includes physicists, senior sensor specialists, analytics experts, and aerospace professionals focused on detection, characterization, and evaluation of UAP.

Lembeck showcased a range of citizen science sensor systems designed to corroborate pilot reports, including:

Hemispherical high-resolution camera systems

 with seven low-light cameras and Raspberry Pi processors performing real-time image analysis, available for under $1,000

 augmented with GPS, magnetometers, temperature, pressure, humidity, and radiation sensors, with data stored in Grafana databases for anomaly detection

 using L3 Harris PVS14 goggles paired with light-sensitive cameras and neural network processing to flag non-linear motion

 adapted for sky monitoring with integrated ADS-B data to eliminate known aircraft from consideration

 using software-defined radio to detect reflected signals and calculate range and velocity

 monitoring for meteor ionization trails that could indicate natural phenomena

The committee has deployed sensor packages in multiple locations, including a triangular array of all-sky cameras with hyperspectral analysis capability near Huntsville, Alabama, and an upcoming deployment at Mount Rainier in Washington State.

Lembeck explained how the distributed sensor network aims to validate pilot observations. "When a pilot reports something to Ryan's ASA group, we can go back to that region, we can look for any anomalies in the environment. We can assess the weather, we can assess other things that might be happening in the electromagnetic field, both natural and non-natural occurrences."

The AIAA team is developing open-source software that will be available via GitHub, allowing citizen scientists to build their own detection systems using published parts lists and software packages. This approach aims to create a standardized, scientifically rigorous foundation for data collection across multiple independent observation points.

ASA is building the integration framework to connect these distributed sensors into a centralized analytical platform. "We're looking to be able to incorporate not just the sensors that the AIAA team is working on, but provide a common API, so any hardware provider that wants to dial into the system and get access to the same analytical tools that we have could very well do so," Graves explained. "Creating a centralized database that's going to push forward the state of understanding, and have it shared with everyone."

Legislative Progress and Institutional Change

Graves outlined progress on multiple legislative fronts designed to remove reporting barriers and create formal investigation pathways.

The Safe Airspace for Americans Act, first introduced in 2024 by Representatives Grothman and Garcia and reintroduced in late 2025, would create a dedicated UAP reporting system for pilots, classify incidents as workplace hazards to trigger existing whistleblower protections, and empower NASA to educate pilots on reporting mechanisms. "From my conversations with the aviation industry here in the United States, that legislation would be a very large step forward into unlocking pilots' ability to communicate about the issues that they see more broadly," Graves said.

At the state level, New Jersey passed legislation establishing a $2.5 million UAP research center partnering with local universities, while Vermont has introduced similar legislation currently under consideration. ASA is working with representatives in additional states to develop comparable frameworks that would integrate emergency management agencies, local airports, and police forces into coordinated data collection systems.

"If we can start to collect all that information across these different channels on a state-by-state basis, we might be able to do what the federal government has neglected to do…" Graves said.

Both presenters emphasized that increased reporting volume and consistency remain the primary obstacles to deeper understanding. "It's actually getting them to report what they're actually seeing," Graves said. "That's what's holding back a more fundamental understanding. We're still just scraping the barrel as far as how many total sightings there are."

The 2026 UAP Detection and Tracking Summit brought together 34 speakers across 14 sessions, with full recordings and transcripts available to registered attendees. ASA's presentation established the organization's position at the intersection of operational pilot experience, technical sensor development, legislative advocacy, and academic research infrastructure.

With over 31,000 members and more than 1,000 reports collected, ASA continues to build the ecosystem necessary to transform aviation safety reporting from a career risk into a protected contribution to airspace awareness and risk mitigation.

ASA Presented Aviation Safety Framework at 2026 UAP Detection and Tracking Summit