Explainable Recognition of Complex Flight Maneuvers via Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models

Complex flight maneuver recognition (FMR) underpins intelligent flight training, including training assessment, pilot skill profiling, and flight safety monitoring. Existing FMR methods typically require large labeled datasets, generalize poorly across aircraft, and provide limited decision transparency. We propose TableManeuver, an explainable LLM-based FMR method that reformulates multivariate flight parameter time series as table-understanding inputs. The method updates no base LLM parameters and uses a small labeled training set only as a retrieval library; it is therefore not a zero-shot setting. TableManeuver first converts flight parameter sequences into tabular text that preserves temporal indices and channel semantics, reducing the mismatch between numerical time series and the textual semantic space of LLMs. It then combines domain knowledge, neighborhood sample references, and task decomposition prompts in a retrieval-augmented reasoning architecture that guides explicit step-by-step inference. We evaluate the method on a flight dataset collected from human pilots on a high-fidelity flight simulation platform. Without base LLM parameter updates, TableManeuver achieves 96.2% precision, 96.8% recall, and a 96.5% F1 score, exceeding the strongest supervised baseline by 3.5 percentage points in F1. In cross-aircraft evaluation, the F1 score decreases by only 1.4 percentage points, which is substantially smaller than the degradation observed for deep learning baselines. Retrieval-only baselines that transfer neighbor labels without LLM inference perform markedly worse, indicating that the performance gains are not explained by neighbor label transfer alone. TableManeuver combines recognition accuracy, cross-aircraft robustness, and readable step-by-step reasoning evidence, offering a practical route for applying LLMs to aviation time series analysis.