Did hiring loads of gamers not work out? The Federal Aviation Administration is now spending north of $875 million to deploy an AI-powered air traffic control tool, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The system, called SMART — short for Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories — automatically analyzes factors like airline schedules, weather patterns, and airport runway capacity to help streamline operations and point out any potential conflicts before they occur, according to an official release cited in the reporting.
It’s set to have a huge role. As the WSJ puts it, “when fully rolled out across US airspace, the software is supposed to act as something like the brains of the nation’s air-traffic control system.”
And no pressure to this potentially trailblazing experiment in AI in air traffic operations: it’s first being used in Washington, DC, one of the busiest stretches of airspace in the nation, as soon as Monday.
The rollout of the AI system is the latest step the Trump administration has taken to revamp air traffic control systems, which have been under constant scrutiny after a series of deadly, high profile aviation incidents at the beginning of his term. One of the main issues in the spotlight has been chronic shortage of properly trained air traffic controllers — a problem that precedes Trump’s presidency, to be fair.
US transportation secretary Sean Duffy first teased the FAA’s interest in deploying SMART in April. Back then, he estimated that the government would spend $12 billion on the system, claiming it could help air traffic controllers plan flights weeks in advance.
“This software will say, ‘well, listen, we can see this 45 days out. Let’s move some of those flights a little bit later, or five, seven, 10 minutes earlier, and we can resolve the issue. And so then you are not delayed,’” Duffy said in an interview with CBS News.
The firm behind it, Air Space Intelligence, was awarded a $875 million, 12-year government contract earlier this year, according to the new reporting. Some aviation industry figures find the scale of its rollout to be much smaller to what they were hoping, it noted.
Politico fleshes out the situation a bit more. According to its coverage, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said that the goal is to expand SMART after a 90-day testing period. But until the announcement about its limited scale, many in the industry were panicking about how extensively the AI would be weaved into everyday air traffic operations.
Three airline officials claimed that the industry was baffled about how the tool would even work. Some feared that the AI would create chaos by recommending more flights be cancelled or rescheduled to avoid potential bottlenecks.
“We’ve been requesting and… talking to [FAA] and saying, ‘Let’s narrow the scope of this. Start, crawl, walk, run.’ And I think ultimately that’s what they decided to do,” one anonymously quoted airline industry official told Politico.
Do we have airliners to thank for walking the FAA back from the “full-send AI” brink, then? As their concerns mounted, the FAA held a series of meetings to answer their questions and assuage their concerns, with perhaps scaling back the AI rollout being one of its concessions. The agency also assured that the AI wouldn’t be directly integrated into day-to-day air traffic management, per Politico. Instead, the tool will be used to generate alternative routing options when air traffic is backed up.
These promises have seemingly now won over key factions of the industry.
“We’re just in the initial stages, but it’s one of the most exciting and bold initiatives taken on by the FAA in decades,” Airlines for America, a trade group representing major airliners, said in a statement.
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