ATIS Alerts Launches Ask ATIS AI: Plain-English Answers About Airport Weather, Runways and Delays at Any US Airport
Free on the atisalerts.com homepage, the new search turns questions like “best airport to fly into if I’m going to Winter Park FL” or “why is KBOS delayed?” into short, sourced, time-stamped answers built only from live FAA and NOAA data — never from the model’s memory.
LONGWOOD, FL, September 22, 2026 — atisalerts.com, the free aviation-weather site and Telegram alert service, today announced Ask ATIS AI, a natural-language search built into its homepage. Pilots and travelers can now type a question the way they would ask a flight instructor or a dispatcher and get a short, sourced answer in a few seconds: the current weather at an airport, the wind on each runway, which runway the tower is using, closures and NOTAMs, active FAA ground stops and delay programs, temporary flight restrictions, what the forecast expects tonight, how often an airport goes IFR in a given month, or which public airports serve a town they are flying to.
Ask ATIS AI is deliberately not a chatbot. The language model is never allowed to look up, recall or estimate aviation data. Every question first goes through deterministic parsing that identifies the airports, the runway, the time window and what is being asked. The site then fetches and computes the answer from the same structured data that powers its airport pages: METAR and TAF from the NOAA Aviation Weather Center, digital ATIS broadcasts, tower runway configuration from the FAA’s TFDM feed, NOTAMs from FAA SWIM, FAA National Airspace System delay status, TFRs, FAA airport facility records, and the site’s own observation history and climatology. The model’s only job is to narrate that fact sheet in plain language.
The result is an answer that behaves the way a careful briefer would. Every answer states the observation time and its age, keeps observed conditions separate from forecast conditions, names its sources, and links to the airport and runway pages behind it. If a dataset was not checked or is unavailable, the answer says so instead of guessing. It never tells a pilot whether a flight is safe or which runway to take; it lays out the conditions and leaves the decision to the pilot and official sources.
Key benefits for pilots
- Runway-by-runway wind, instantly. “What are the runway winds at KDEN?” returns the headwind or tailwind and the crosswind component for every runway, flags the lowest-crosswind option, and distinguishes the runway the tower has active from the one the wind merely favors.
- Closures, NOTAMs and TFRs in plain language. Runway status comes from NOTAMs, the tower feed and the D-ATIS, with freshness stated. Absence of a NOTAM is never presented as proof a runway is open.
- Destination planning that understands towns, not just codes. A question like “best airport to fly into if I’m going to Winter Park FL” lists the public airports within 50 nautical miles, nearest first, with tower, METAR and TAF flags, fuel types on file, the longest runway and its surface, published instrument approaches, and current conditions at the reporting fields. The lookup covers more than 32,000 US cities, towns and places.
- Forecast and change questions. “Will KAPA crosswinds exceed 15 knots tonight?”, “When will KBOS become VFR?” and “What changed at KMCO in the last six hours?” are answered from the TAF and the site’s hourly observation history, with the issue times quoted.
- History at a glance. “How often is KDEN IFR in January?” draws on multi-year climatology so pilots can set expectations before they plan a trip.
- One tap to a free alert. Every answer offers a free Telegram alert for the airport in question, so a pilot who just asked about a crosswind can be messaged the moment it changes.
Key benefits for travelers
- Why is my airport delayed? “Why is KBOS delayed?” explains any active FAA ground stop or ground delay program, with the FAA’s stated reason and times, plus the weather behind it.
- Will tonight’s flight be affected? “What’s the weather at KMCO tonight?” gives the current conditions and what the forecast expects, kept clearly apart.
- Which airport serves my destination? Travelers arranging a charter or a general-aviation trip can ask which airports serve a town and see the options with distances, size and services on file.
- Jargon explained on request. When a question is asked in everyday words, the answer briefly explains terms such as MVFR or a ceiling the first time it uses them.
Built to understand how people actually type
Ask ATIS AI accepts questions as people write them on a phone: all lowercase, without commas, with a spelled-out state, an airport nickname or a landmark. “winter park fl”, “Winter Park, FL” and “winter park florida” resolve to the same place; “O’Hare” resolves to KORD; “airports near Disney World” resolves to Orlando, Florida. When the deterministic parser cannot identify a location, the model is asked only to list the places the question mentions, and every proposal is verified against the site’s airport database and the US Census place gazetteer before it is used. Anything the database cannot confirm is dropped, and the answer shows how the question was interpreted.
“Pilots already juggle METARs, TAFs, ATIS broadcasts, NOTAMs and FAA delay pages across half a dozen apps. We wanted one place where you can just ask the question and get a straight, sourced answer, without ever wondering whether the AI made something up. The model is not allowed to touch the data; it only explains what our systems already computed.”
Availability
Ask ATIS AI is live today on the atisalerts.com homepage. It is free, requires no account, and covers any US airport in the site’s database. Traditional airport search is unchanged: typing an identifier or an airport name still opens that airport’s page. Every answer carries the site’s standing notice that it is a planning aid only and that pilots must verify current conditions with official FAA-approved sources before flight.
About ATIS Alerts
atisalerts.com is a free aviation-weather website and Telegram alert service, independently built and operated in Longwood, Florida. The site puts live METAR, TAF and D-ATIS for every US airport on one page, alongside runway-by-runway wind and configuration intelligence, FAA delay and TFR tracking, multi-year weather rankings, and free pilot tools. Its Telegram bot messages pilots the moment an ATIS broadcast changes or the weather drops below their personal minimums. ATIS Alerts is not affiliated with the FAA, and nothing on the site is approved for operational use: it is a planning and situational-awareness aid, and pilots must verify conditions with official FAA-approved sources before flight.
Media contact
support@atisalerts.com. Put “Press” in the subject line. Screenshots and logo files are available on request.
⚠️ Not for operational use. Always verify with official FAA-approved preflight weather sources before flight.