Civil aviation is safety critical and its operations, from flight decks and towers to ramps and maintenance, generate massive, heterogeneous data at the network edge. Yet cloud centric deployment of large Artificial Intelligence (AI) models often produces high task latency, lacks offline capability in communication denied environments, and requires centralizing sensitive data, raising privacy and sovereignty risks. Edge AI moves perception, prediction, and decision logic closer to the data producers via compression, collaborative inference, and split learning, thereby reducing latency, bandwidth, and exposure while enabling graceful operation during disconnections. This paper provides a panoramic view and a common understanding of edge intelligence tailored to civil aviation. We firstly articulate the operational motivations for edge AI, and then review recent techniques for edge inference and edge learning. We then introduce the organizational computing paradigms and the respective configurations in civil aviation environments; finally, we describe the emerging applications and the future research trends of edge intelligence in civil aviation. We argue that a refined edge solution can complement cloud foundations to deliver low latency, privacy preserving, and resilient AI services across the civil aviation lifecycle.

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